“Today, I think the world is really facing a global crisis, which is simultaneously political, economic, systemic, racial, religious. We have had major international crises historically, but the scope of these international crises gradually got larger and larger. Now the crises are practically all over the place. And the places that are not in crisis are beginning to show some evidence of probably being in crisis before too long.”
“Most of the problems that we had to deal with in the forties, fifties, sixties up to recent years were problems that were prolonged and antedated the event, so to speak. It grew into a problem. Now things happen so quickly and so inconsistently that it’s a continuous struggle, I think, to be on top of it and to have a sustained sense of direction.”
“The concept of a state has a huge spectrum ranging from serious, responsible democracies to non-democratic states, but deeply aware of their own vulnerability as well as of their own power to much more primitive, more emotional entities, which are quasi-states, but they’re states in the sense of, they have authority. They have the capacity to inflict terrible pain on people. I don’t know how helpful that is, state, non-state. If they can do things to us that hurt us a lot, to me, that’s like a state doing it.”