At its most basic the democratic contract is a simple one: the right to vote comes with a responsibility to society through tax payments and citizenship.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

I give away something up to $500 million a year throughout the world promoting Open Society. My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It's their work that I'm supporting. So it's not me doing it.

Boy's natural play is rough and tumble play it's the universal play of little boys. And it's very different from aggression. And we are a society that's failing to understand the distinction.

In modern society where most people live in cities and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency - money - the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.

The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society.

Society cannot continue to disable themselves through their need to categorize people or make assumptions as to another individual's abilities.

But if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they've been brought there by no fault of their own I don't think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society.

Through their own actions customers can hold companies responsible to higher standards of social responsibility. Through collective action they can leverage their dollars to combat the force of those investors who myopically pursue profits at the expense of the rest of society.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.