In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.

For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.

India is a country that has no direct interests in some areas of global conflict. It has very good relations with countries in conflict or countries facing difficult security situations, and I believe Indian diplomacy is very well received. India is a bridge-builder, an honest broker, and a messenger of peace.

Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money.

My mom works at the VA; she's been working at the VA for 15 plus years, and yet she's helping so many veterans coming back from brown Muslim countries, and my mom treats them. It's this weird - sometimes I feel torn. It's this dual identity. I'm so proud to be American, and at the same time, I disagree with our foreign policy.

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved.

We are viewed by the world as a quasi-racist state in which we allow natural disasters to obliterate our minority community, in which our penal system is designed to treat blacks unfairly, and in which we let the medical and educational systems in our ghettos fester to the level of some third-world countries.

Well-trained medical doctors and engineers leave Nigeria to the developed countries. We want to reverse that.

I have devoted much time and energy to helping medical physics in developing countries.

The difference in the quality of medical care received by people with mental illness is one of the reasons why they live shorter lives than people without mental illness. Even in the best-resourced countries in the world, this life expectancy gap is as much as 20 years. In the developing countries of the world, this gap is even larger.

On bad days, I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, 'Yeah, right, I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No.

Medical costs are of concern, both in developing and developed countries.

We have brought down emissions in this country through our legal system and through technological innovation. We can do this on our own. We don't have to have the permission of countries all over the world to do that.

Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine.

Because it started as an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIL has long been subject to U.N. sanctions, and all countries have a legal obligation to freeze its assets and prohibit its business dealings. But countries around the world need to do more to make these sanctions work.

As a factual matter, as in countries all over the world, technology and business practices have been running faster than legal responses and developments.

Women are emerging as a major force for change. Countries that have invested in girls' education and removed legal barriers that prevent women from achieving their potential are now seeing the benefits.

Botswana had three successive good presidents who served their legal terms, who did well for their countries - three, not one.

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices.

Legal aid gets a bad press. Some rail against handing taxpayers' money to criminals; others attack fat cat lawyers, while some argue that we spend far more on legal aid than other countries. But let's get some facts straight: saying that legal aid is just about criminals is wrong - most goes to people before any decision is taken on their guilt.

I think it's going to end up a lot like the Internet. Some countries try to regulate the Internet - bitcoin will be very much like that. It will be legal, and there will be some countries with currency control.

When the FDA announced its intentions to join other countries and ban quinolone use on U.S. chicken farms, the drug manufacturer Bayer initiated legal action that successfully delayed the process for five years.