I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn't have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today.
Today I want to send a message of optismism to all Greeks. Our road, our path, will be more stabilised. Our country will be in a better situation. We will be stronger.
I have a deep sense of responsibility to my country and Greek people.
We stand united, facing the big responsibility to change our country into a nation of justice, solidarity, humanity and green development.
My hope is that we will turn Greece into maybe the most transparent country in the world with everything on the web.
If you put all the European countries together, we are the biggest economy in the world.
How can a parliamentarian or a leader in a country say, on the one hand, that we're going to support Greece but at the same time say that Greeks are lazy?
I will always be upfront with the Greek people, so we can solve the country's problems together.
The biggest issue for me is whether large numbers of Americans can begin to think that government can actually help make the country a fairer place. And that's partly a matter of policies that achieve results in terms of reducing inequality and raising middle-class and working-class incomes, which have been flat for decades. But it's also symbolic and rhetorical, it's whether Hillary Clinton can - or whoever's president - can persuade Americans that it's happening and that they can begin to trust their elected officials a little bit more and their institutions of government a little bit more.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president, how is she going to be able to get the country behind her when she seems like a political figure from another era?
One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.
Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can--immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms--and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.
Like an odorless gas, [inequality] pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of the country's democracy. But it seems impossible to find the source and shut it off.
Between 1980 and 1990, the number of countries that were classified as 'free' or 'mostly free' increased by about 50%.
I think it is absolutely central to our economic plan as a country not only that we put our own house in order but that we better connect ourselves with other parts of the world, particularly the faster growing parts of the world.
[Banks] have a clear obligation to help get this country off its addiction to debt because they sure as hell helped to get this country addicted to debt.
There are those people who don't want change. Well there needs to be a coalition for change amongst the hard-working mainstream majority of the country to crack on and sort out Britain's problems.
One of the big problems we have in this country is that not enough people understand how important it is to save, understand the details of credit card statements, to be able to compare different APRs and the like. I support the idea.
We need a coalition in this country. A coalition of change. People who have had enough of this.
Britain is not part of the single currency. That is a decision we have taken, a voluntary decision of this country, but as a result are part of a European Union 19 of whose members are rapidly integrating, creating political, fiscal, monetary, economic union to make their currency work. And that is increasingly rubbing up against the operation.
Each time I come it's amazing to watch the development of this incredible country [China].
Put on top of that the fact that the whole world is looking at Britain and saying how is this country going to pay its way in the future. They are looking at other countries like Greece who can't pay their way in the future and you see savage spending cuts, big cuts in pay.
I find China such a fascinating and interesting country. Each time I come back something has changed and it's moved on in leaps and bounds.
The Foreign Office is a very important arm of the British state and I think Britain has a fantastic diplomatic service. We are the only country in the world spending 2% of our national income on defence and 0.7% of our national income on aid. We are the only country in the world doing both of those things.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.
