Al Gore

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. … Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

The presidency is more than a popularity contest.

As important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws.

As I have said for many years throughout this land, we’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key: when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. What is missing is a sense of urgency.

Military spending scarcely involves the public, but social spending does, and has a democratizing effect. For reasons like these, military spending is much preferred.

KGB, collapsed. Of course it was incredibly difficult to go through this. After all, most of my life had been devoted to work in the agencies. But I had made my choice.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another. For example, I think about 90% of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians.

None of us and none of the Arabs trust Israel.

The United States could become a color-free society. It’s possible. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it’s perfectly possible that it would happen, and it wouldn’t change the political economy, hardly at all.

You’re having a lot of fun, right? Suppose Hillary got elected instead of Trump, you think it would be so exciting?

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.

If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, ‘What kind of peace?’

My use of social media is not presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!

A total of 1,580 people, the civilian population, suffered as a result of the bloody wave of terrorist acts that swept over Moscow and other towns and villages of our country.

I’m actually proud because I beat [the] Clinton dynasty. I beat [the] Bush dynasty. Now I guess, hopefully I’m in the process of beating very dishonest intelligence because, what they did was incredible.

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the ‘star’ system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another – Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida – some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.