A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question to taste the food of any country to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

More than any other in Western Europe Britain remains a country where a traveler has to think twice before indulging in the ordinary food of ordinary people.

It's difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn't available.

The art and culture that is New York communications finance all these things help make up New York. The rest of the country should be happy that we are what we are.

If US per capita income continues to grow at a rate of 1.5 percent a year the country will have plenty of money to finance comfortable retirements and high-quality healthcare for all citizens including those at the bottom of the wage ladder.

It is a sound principle of finance and a still sounder principle of government that those who have the duty of expending the revenue of a country should also be saddled with the responsibility of levying and providing it.

Sharia has become an increasingly significant force in American capitalism thanks to the embrace by Wall Street and the U.S. government of so-called Sharia-Compliant Finance. Indeed this country's taxpayers now own the largest purveyor of sharia-compliant insurance products in the world: AIG.

Qaddafi is hated because he is the leader of a small country that is rich but he uses his money to finance liberation struggles.

There is no city or country in the world where women and girls live free of the fear of violence. No leader can claim: 'this is not happening in my backyard.'

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.