We need more emphasis on linking jobs and economic progress with environmental issues, and not allowing environmentally damaging industries to be brought into the country simply to provide employment. It's not easy to balance.

The Great Famine is a period of our history that we need to know in great detail in order to understand its continuing impact on us as a people. Its causes were complex. We can't apportion blame simplistically but rather [must] understand that blame has to be shared in different areas and levels of society. It was the very poorest of the poor, the small tenants and cottiers, who really suffered. Others were less affected. But most of all I welcomed the commemoration because it was a moment to look into our past and realize the courage and resilience of those who survived.

Sharing experience and building public support for the full range of rights is more powerful than legal cases.

When we see companies who are in complicit relationships with China, for example, making huge profits by providing China with the very software that enables the state to censor its own people, that is not acceptable. We need to engage with such companies to make their responsibilities clear.

If the Chinese business community takes the Declaration of Human Rights, core labor standards, and environmental standards seriously, the government of China will take them far more seriously, too.

If you live in a global world and you want to champion liberty in it, then you have you got to sign up to that global world.

We need to understand that we need to get the work-life balance better for both men and women - by men taking on more of those roles of homemaking and child rearing - it's an important area that we still haven't got right. I do worry; it's not just in the United States, it's also in parts of Latin America.