The presence of industrial quantities of Byzantine pottery dating from the sixth century AD on the headland at Tintagel, Chinese silk in the tombs around Mecca and 'Arabic' numerals in the 13th-century beams of Salisbury Cathedral tell us we have been interdependent not for decades but across millennia.

A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersonal relationships.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way - everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.

At a deep level all things in our Universe are ineffably interdependent and interconnected, as we are part of the Matryoshka-like mathematical object of emergent levels of complexity where consciousness pervades all levels.

I think that we had a different view of what the 21st century could be like with much more of a sense from our perspective of trying to have an interdependent world: looking at solving regional conflicts having strength in alliances operating within some kind of a sense that we were part of the international community and not outside of it.

A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent interpersonal relationships.

In today's interdependent world a threat to one becomes a menace to all. And no state can defeat these challenges and threats alone.