I always thought we had an environmental problem but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at and a lot more urgently is those who fail.

To be clear climate change is a true 800 pound gorilla in the room. The effects of global warming threaten global environmental upheaval over the coming century. But for South Florida and the Everglades it could be our death knell if urgent action is not taken.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful often urgent and essentially life-affirming but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice exploitation humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

Most urgently women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.

I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.

Every time a student walks past a really urgent expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college it can help reassure him that he does have that mind does have that soul.

Insurgents have capitalized on popular resentment and anger towards the United States and the Iraqi government to build their own political financial and military support and the faith of Iraqi citizens in their new government has been severely undermined.

Today more than ever we need creative minds to address the issues of the age. And one of the most urgent is this: How can humanity know so much achieve so much and still fail so many people so badly?

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.