Violence against women isn't cultural, it's criminal. Equality cannot come eventually, it's something we must fight for now.

Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.

What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring - or even stagger - back up.

Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable.

It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.

My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

I like to think that as I get older I'm getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.

It's one thing to think you're worthless, and quite another for somebody else to tell you that you are.

Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.

Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

Adolescence is when children start trying to bring up their parents.

No one needs to tell me about the importance of the free press in a democratic society or about the essential role a newspaper can play in its community.

I really think that's the key, part of the spiritual renewal that America needs to have, the notion that we really can have confidence in a better tomorrow.

I'm too diplomatic. I tend to edit my mind before I speak - it can be incredibly draining.

The difference between a politician and a pickpocket is that a pickpocket doesn't always get indignant when you tell him to keep his hands to himself.

All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.

I would literally do anything for Richard Curtis. Anything.