Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay.

Hope and optimism aren't just attitudes, they are life strategies.

It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money; it is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence.

A vision without resources is an hallucination.

Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.

Scientists tend to focus on what they don't know more than what they do know. And there are a lot of things we still don't know about the climate. But we know the difference between climate variability and climate change, and right now the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is well outside the variability pattern - and that's quite quantifiable.

I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before.