The things we do to our children - most of the evil in the world is not done with bad intentions but with the best intentions ever.
To me, the term 'middle-class' connotes a safe, comfortable, middle-of-the road policy. Above all, our language is 'middle-class' in the middle of our road. To drive it to one side or the other or even off the road, is the noblest task of the future.
After the clinch, it doesn't matter what happens, one way or another, we're going to hit the ground, and we'll be in my world. The ground is my ocean, I'm the shark, and most people don't even know how to swim.
It was so important that women were involved in 'She's Gotta Have It' because it's about a woman's opinion. It's about her views of herself, and the world around her, and how the world perceives her, and finding that ground for herself - not even a common ground, but that ground for herself in which she can walk on firmly with confidence.
What we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism (including intellectual egoism), our sense of injury, our lack of love and forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it springs from the best intentions, as futile.
Reasonable, even intelligent people can, and frequently do, disagree on how best to achieve peace in the Middle East, but, peace must be the goal of our foreign policy tools, whether they be by the stick or by the carrot.
In 1977, when I started my first job at the Federal Reserve Board as a staff economist in the Division of International Finance, it was an article of faith in central banking that secrecy about monetary policy decisions was the best policy: Central banks, as a rule, did not discuss these decisions, let alone their future policy intentions.
Without action, the best intentions in the world are nothing more than that: intentions.
As a newly married person, as much as I would love for my husband to buy into the 'my way or the highway' philosophy, you realize it's all about compromising and finding some sort of middle ground that everyone can live with.
Life has a way of disregarding even your best intentions.
We judge our own character by our best intentions and most noble acts, but we will be judged by our last worst act.
I think the best and perhaps only sensible policy for the future is to prepare society for change and be prepared to adjust. In 25 years, we'll have a world with some 9 to 10 billion people that will require twice as much primary energy as today. We must embrace new science and technology in a more positive way than we presently do in Europe. This includes, for example, nuclear energy and genetic food production to provide the world what it urgently needs.
I never liked the middle ground-the most boring place in the world.
I think I'm most comfortable when I function in a parallel space that's not separate from political reality, but somehow comments on it from a different portal. The crisis in the Middle East has been ongoing and repetitive and I feel solutions on the ground have reached an impasse. It is somehow necessary to change the way we approach commentary on the subject. I do think that erecting a meta-space that functions according to its own autonomous abstractions and logic could be more effective in finding ways of dealing with the problem at hand, than using our standard tools of analysis.
America needs a sensible, sustainable Iran policy that can meet U.S. security and economic interests, command international support and withstand the shifting Middle Eastern sands.
Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.