No amount of humanitarian assistance can protect people from being attacked.

I think now, we in the international community are belatedly wanting to show our solidarity with the Somali peoples and also do our best to help them move to better times.

We need better coordination on the international side, just as they need better and more effective efforts on the Somali side. We have too many reconstruction and development assistance plans.

I think the biggest challenge for Somalia has been the sense that it is a hopeless case of incomprehensible internal conflicts and there is nothing we can do.

We estimate that humanitarian agencies have access to about 350,000 vulnerable people in Darfur - only about one third of the estimated total population in need.

We receive reports now on a daily basis from our own people on the ground in Darfur on widespread atrocities and grave violations of human rights against the civilian population.

In a world full of competing emergencies and disasters, it really helps if there is an international locomotive that can help us bring attention - help us bring resources.

Secondly, the Government of Sudan should commit to the disarmament and control of the Janjaweed militia and ensure that the targeting of civilians ceases immediately.

First there is the search and rescue phase that is now ending. It is a cruel reality.

I have been working, as emergency relief coordinator, on an international scale, very hard to build a wider alliance of partners in assistance efforts.

Many access roads are too dangerous for relief workers, preventing them from carrying out assessments or reaching people in need.

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.

Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.

For me, stories are like WD-40 for the brain: they keep all the wheels and gears and clicky-things running smoothly. Without them, cognitive function becomes a bore.

It's no fun feeling your thoughts are being controlled by an electrode, and someone else is holding the clicker.

The goose lays the golden egg. Payrolls make consumers.

An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality.

The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it..." -Ralph Waldo Emerson