The mandate I have received and for which I will speak with heart and head to implement over the next seven years had its four pillars - an inclusive citizenship equality and participation and respect in a creative society creating an excellence in everything we Irish do.

A fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.

Here are the values that I stand for: honesty equality kindness compassion treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me those are traditional values.

Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.

No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

But reducing harmful emissions abating our dependence on foreign oil and developing alternative renewable energy sources have benefits that go beyond environmental health they improve personal health enhance national security and encourage our nation's economic viability.

A fascinating challenge facing today's environmental movement is how to best approach the reversal of past decisions that altered once-pristine environmental spaces for the sake of urgent man-made needs.

There's so many issues tied to the meat industry. I mean social environmental humanitarian - all of them. I know that when I'm eating that I'm not hurting the planet I'm not hurting other people on this planet I'm not hurting animals... and I'm not hurting nature.

If China is helping its domestic industries charge an artificially low price for solar panels and other environmental goods then China is violating international trade rules that it agreed to when it became a member of the World Trade Organization.

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

Fully 57 percent of American college students are women. Life insurance companies sell more policies to women than to men. As women continue to draw on experience and education they're accelerating their numbers in upper management too.

Education technology and school construction go together. Modernization updating education facilities and making a capital investment in education are all included.

I think the most important issue for all of us is our economy and jobs and creating opportunities for young people to be able to get the education that you need to be able to afford to go to college.

I believe that access to a university education should be based on the ability to learn not what people can afford. I think there is no more nauseating a sight than politicians pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them.

About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology which I look at as a global platform.

To create the power of competence without creating a corresponding direction to guide the use of that power is bad education.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

If you improve education by teaching for competence eliminating schooling and connecting with students the test scores will improve.

If you go and talk to most people they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say 'Oh well that must be true.'

I went to a football school which meant that I went to a university that served up education and was simultaneously operating a sports franchise.

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics because discrimination poverty and ignorance restrict growth while investments in education infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things not simply repeating what other generations have done.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends they are the sole instruments of registering perpetuating and transmitting thought.