Membership in the European Community, now the European Union, has helped Ireland to take its place as a European country with all the member states, including Britain. It has therefore helped the maturing of a good bilateral relationship with Britain, lifting part of the burden of history.

You can convene a wider cross-section if you have no turf to defend, because then you don't cut across anyone else's agenda and you can achieve a great deal.

I'm a very wide reader. I read serious books and I read airplane, forgettable books. I never have fewer than four or five books beside my bed at night. I particularly enjoy reading about people who have gone through a personal growth.

The burden of health care shouldn't be borne by the poorest families. We should have equity within health systems so that families are able to cope with serious illness and not be driven into poverty and relationship breakdown because they don't have access to health care.

Feel empowered. And if you start to do it, if you start to feel your voice heard, you will never go back.

Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

I don't like a bipolar or a unipolar world. I like a multipolar world but on many occasions people have been surprised that South Africa has not seemed, internationally as well as internally, to take a decision that affirms the true values of your Constitution and the vision of those who were there at the beginning - Madiba himself and others.