When you're young with less on the line it's easier to be audacious to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics sex drugs rock-and-roll etc. - to the comics page which for many years caused a rolling furor.

I'm an independent. I'm a centrist. A new generation is arriving that has grown up with a multiplicity of choice in every aspect of their lives and yet politics is the last place that they are told that they should be satisfied with a choice between brand A and brand B. It doesn't fit the way they think. It doesn't fit the way they live.

Once the cry and the cause of a generation of progressives to make America safer fairer and cleaner 'regulation' is now a dirty word in our politics. Even Democrats are quick to talk about cutting regulations Republicans hate them with - how to put it? - evangelical fervor.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and more especially from her lyrics of the last generation.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.

We believe democracy to be the only real guarantor of stability and we have sought to create a 'Jordanian model' that might also inspire others in our region. I wish democracy and peace to be my legacy to my people and the shield of generations to come.

I feel that my father's greatest legacy was the people he inspired to get involved in public service and their communities to join the Peace Corps to go into space. And really that generation transformed this country in civil rights social justice the economy and everything.

Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war a war which will last for generations.

The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate... we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.

Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century tempered by war disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.