Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production - oriented society and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.

Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.

Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.