It's such an extraordinary time to be alive that you just don't want to miss it. I mean, it's a really neat historical period.

The definition of who's literate and who's not keeps changing. So, in Neanderthal times, if you painted on a cave wall, that was enough to transmit how you hunt, how you eat, how you cook, how you dress, and we can read about that.

We have to get serious about living within our means.

If you depend on a single industry, if you don't continuously upgrade it, if that industry is not producing real wealth, if it's simply shuffling paper from here to here in a very efficient manner sometimes, that's not enough and that's not where you begin to get the rest of your jobs.

The Americas has been a relatively stable continent. The last truly new border we have is Panama in 1903.

Until African-Americans and Hispanics can get serious, not just about area studies, which are important, but also about science and technology, they're not going to generate that wealth and that job within those communities. And that has absolutely devastating consequences for the places where people live, for the jobs and for the wealth.

If you had a front row seat at the Renaissance, you would have seen Machiavelli come by plotting, and you would have seen murders in the streets, you would have seen violence, you have seen people burning books and it would have looked like the world was a horrible place, but that's where all these incredible stuff we're still living with comes out of.