This used to be a government of checks and balances. Now it's all checks and no balances.

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.

When my mother had to get dinner for 8 she'd just make enough for 16 and only serve half.

In government as well as in trade a new era came to the colonies in 1763.

Everywhere among the English-speaking race criminal justice was rude, and punishments were barbarous; but the tendency was to do away with special privileges and legal exemptions.

It has always been the role of government to help solve problems, including and especially health crises. Obesity is a health epidemic across our country, and we have a responsibility as a government and a society to do all we can to promote good nutrition and healthy eating so we can reverse this alarming trend.

School is where children spend most of their time, and it is where we lay the foundation for healthy habits. That's why New Jersey is the first state to adopt a comprehensive school nutrition policy that bans candy, soda, and other junk food.

Traditional marriage between a man and a woman has been a cornerstone of our society for generations. If we are going to change that, it ought to be done by the will of the people.

Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.

Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It's a way to understand how the world will look in the future.

Let's make it simple: Government control means uniformity, regulation, fees, inspection, and yes, compliance.

What's great about our leadership is they welcome other ideas.

I vote my conscience first and my constituents next, regardless of the direction of our leadership.

Any government that has a sincere desire for reform and progress should understand the benefit of objective and constructive criticism.

You cannot transpose the U.S. system on Turkey, and the Turkish system on France etc. You have to understand the people and their culture. That's leadership.

Bahrainis are better off than many other Arabs. We have a welfare state, everybody gets a salary whether they have a job or not. Electricity and food are subsidized; school and healthcare are free. And we don't differentiate between Bahrainis and foreigners. We are very proud of that.

The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is about protecting ourselves from a tyrannical government.

My grandmother, who picked cotton, and my mom, who picked cotton as a child - my grandmother had a work ethic. She had 13 children that she had to raise and ended up for a time moving into the projects, but because my grandmother had a work ethic, she didn't stay in the projects... that's not how she wanted to raise her children.

Journalism is about results. It's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way.

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy.

In North America, more than half of all children travel to school by bus. We need a similar programme in London.

A pound invested in energy efficiency buys seven times more energy solution than a pound invested in nuclear power.

Politicians usually get the blame for dragging their feet on environmental issues. And fair enough. Most of them do just that. But the blame isn't theirs alone. For politicians afraid of losing votes, a bristling media waiting to transform good green ideas into monsters is a colossal disincentive.

A number of countries around the world, and indeed the E.U. as a whole, have chosen not to allow the import from the U.S. of beef from cows fed a diet that includes the hormone ractopamine, because of the fairly grave health concerns.

GM has never been about feeding the world or tackling environmental problems. It is and has always been about control of the global food economy by a tiny handful of giant corporations. It's not wicked to question that process. It is wicked not to.

We always hear from newspapers that while people understand the environmental challenge, they are unwilling to stomach the solutions. The trouble is, we only ever hear about the solutions from the media, and for whatever reason, they are almost always caricatured beyond recognition. If there's no appetite for green, it's not surprising.

By uploading 40 years of 'Ecologist' editions online, we will be creating the world's most extensive ecological archive. 'The Ecologist' will continue to set the environmental and political agenda here and abroad.

Politics colours everything, and anyone who wants change is necessarily political. As an environmental campaigner more or less since I left school in the early '90s, I have always been involved in lobbying, campaigning and pushing for changes.

'Green' is likely to be a big issue in the 2008 U.S. presidential election - largely in response to George Bush's suicidal refusal to engage with environmental issues.

Some boys accepted me, some didn't. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: 'What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?'

Clearly, those of us women who play football wish that there was more coverage. But it's one of those things that happens. Every year the level is getting higher, and I think we surprise a lot of people when the world focuses its attention on the World Cup or the Olympics final.

There's still prejudice and that resistance regarding women, not only on female football but in various activities. Men think that women are a bit fragile to perform some types of activities or don't have the ability and aren't strong enough.

My intention is to get more involved in social projects so I can give people a message of hope.

'Illustrado' is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness... The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too.

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.

I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.

What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don't have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.

The war on drugs has made government more powerful, citizens less free, and hasn't helped users or addicts.

Somehow our society has formed a one-sided view of the human personality, and for some reason everyone understood giftedness and talent only as it applied to the intellect. But it is possible not only to be talented in one's thoughts but also to be talented in one's feelings as well.

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

What a child can do in cooperation today, he can do alone tomorrow.

I've never believed much in that holding hands kind of love. I've always thought that love is about two different personalities trying to confront life, trying to make sense of their responsibilities, to themselves, to each other, and to the wider society.

Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder. It is a howling reproach.

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled.

Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations.

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

How a society treats its disabled is the true measure of a civilization.

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.

Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.