What I've seen from keeping in touch as well as I can is that what I find so typical in Mexican culture is the helpfulness of the people to each other. I think, at this point, that is the highest good and the highest we can hope for - which is to be of help and use to each other wherever we are.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
The biggest problem in South Africa is that we have a disrupted timeline. Historically, politically, spiritually, economically, in people's minds, in people's heads.
I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism.
Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.
Ten percent of people can think, another ten percent of people think that they think, and eighty percent of people would rather die than be made to think.
I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams.
There is a subset of Democrats who tend to mis-fill out ballots. The way you mark the ballot is like an S.A.T. - you fill in the circle. And the subset of people who tend to, like, put a check there instead, or an X, or fill it out wrong, tend to be people who didn't take S.A.T.s, or first-time voters, or people with English as a second language.
But the true threats to stability and peace are these nations that are not very transparent, that hide behind the-that don't let people in to take a look and see what they're up to. They're very kind of authoritarian regimes. The true threat is whether or not one of these people decide, peak of anger, try to hold us hostage, ourselves; the Israelis, for example, to whom we'll defend, offer our defenses; the South Koreans.
But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over.