At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different

The Amazon is not just a set of trees. It is a set of 25 million people. If we don't create real economic opportunities for them, the practical result is to encourage disorganized economic activities that results in the further destruction of the rain forest.

In my view, a political vision is not a grab-bag of discrete problems and solutions. It is the visionary anticipation of a direction.

The essential thing, the ultimate goal of politics and thought, is a bigger life for the individual. A bigger life – that remains the main objective…to increase our divine attributes to have moral life.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

I regard myself as a man without charm in a country of charmers.

Brazil has no future as a China with fewer people.

In a world of democracies, the most deserving basis of national differences is that the different states of the world should represent a form of moral specialisation within humanity.

When we imagine our Universe to be just one out of a multitude of possible worlds we devalue this world, the one we see, the one we should be trying to explain.

In a world of democracies, in a world where the great projects that have set humanity on fire are the projects of the emancipation of individuals from entrenched social division and hierarchy in such a world individuals must never be puppets or prisoners of the societies or cultures into which they have been born.