My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

For me it's absolutely the same - I treat one and the other in exactly the same way. As persons, that is, not as men and women. But, even here, you have to consider the fact that I've had a very special education, that I'm the daughter of a man like my father and a woman like my mother.

Not only my parents but the whole family was involved in the resistance - my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts, my cousings of both sexes. So ever so often the police came and took them away, indiscriminately. Well, the fact that they arrested both my father and mother, both my grandfather and grandmother, both an uncle and an aunt, made me accustomed to looking on men and women with the same eyes, on an absolute plane of equality.

As a nation, I believe we've acquired faith in ourselves.

I'm trained to difficulties; difficulties can't be eliminated from life.

By now even the word socialism has so many meanings and interpretations. The Russians call themselves socialists, the Swedes call themselves. And let's not forget that in Germany there was also a national socialism.

The civil servant is primarily the master of the short-term solution.