We had a rule in the school that when you're punished, you carry out the punishment and then complain, which I felt was absolutely unfair: if I'd done it, what was the point of complaining?

Ameen Rihani, one of the earliest Arab Americans, devoted his life to bringing the East and the West together. We are not of the East or the West, he wrote. No boundaries exist in our breast: We are free.

Let us, above all, be clear that, without a convincing program of debt relief to start the new millennium, our objective of halving world poverty by 2015 will be only a pipe dream.

When you have difficult issues on the table for discussion, then sometimes for Africa you may have Burundi or Gambia representing them on the Security Council; and then for Latin America you may have a country like Costa Rica, which is a wonderful country but they don't have the same weight as others from the other regions. And sometimes they get bullied. Sometimes their capitals come under lots of pressure to take a position.

It is within the family that children learn the values that will guide them for the rest of their lives. It is within the family that they form their earliest relationships, learn to communicate with others and interact with the world around them. It is within the family that the notion of human rights becomes a reality lived on a daily basis. If tolerance, respect and equity permeate family life, they will translate into values that shape societies, nations and the world.

Most people forget that even in Iraq, by the time the air and no-fly zone was established, the air defence system had been removed through the first Gulf war. All of them had been neutralised.

Revolution by its nature can not be overly programmed or directed. There are so many forces at work that you don't know where and how it all ends.