The Amazon is not just a set of trees. It is a set of 25 million people. If we don't create real economic opportunities for them, the practical result is to encourage disorganized economic activities that results in the further destruction of the rain forest.

The supreme good of life is vitality. And vitality is always seeping away.

The essential thing, the ultimate goal of politics and thought, is a bigger life for the individual. A bigger life – that remains the main objective…to increase our divine attributes to have moral life.

When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain.

Social solidarity must rest instead on the sole secure basis it can have: direct responsibility of people for one another. Such responsibility can be realized through the principle that every able-bodied adult holds a position within the caring economy - the part of the economy in which people care for one another - as well as within the production system.

I regard myself as a man without charm in a country of charmers.

In a world of democracies, in a world where the great projects that have set humanity on fire are the projects of the emancipation of individuals from entrenched social division and hierarchy; in such a world individuals must never be puppets or prisoners of the societies or cultures into which they have been born.