Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.

In one way or another, President Obama's critics will dog him all the way to Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and even his admirers will continue to have doubts about his accomplishments if not his promise.

Barack Obama's name will be the one on the peace prize, but his speech and his manner could become a gift for generations to come.

What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.

I was still in college when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.

Because I lived in construction towns, we had a lot of workers who came from the South. They were all white, and, sorry to say, a number of them were pretty redneck.

When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns.

Everywhere I go - from Main Street to Wall Street - people ask, 'What's happened to our political system? Why can't Washington folks work together?'

As young parents of three girls, living in California during the late Sixties and early Seventies, Meredith and I couldn't help but be aware of the rising level of dialogue, debate, commentary, and proclamations about the place of women in society and about how to raise females in light of this raised consciousness.

Sometime in the early Seventies, gender-free toys were briefly a popular idea. So at Christmas on the California beach in 1972, we downplayed the dolls with frilly dresses and loaded up Santa's sack with toy trucks and earth movers for our three daughters.

Our daughters were coming of age during a rising consciousness about gender equality. Throughout their school years - from kindergarten through graduate school, 1972 to 1992 - women were starting to take their places in areas traditionally reserved mostly for men.

One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children.

I've lost seven friends to smoking-related lung cancer. Each death was a long, agonizing experience.

After 50 years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, my father died, too young, of a massive heart attack. He was 69. It's almost certain that all those years of nicotine inhalation were a major contributor to his clogged arteries.

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

John F. Kennedy, the man I had thought would define the political ideal for the rest of my days, was suddenly gone in the senseless violence of a single moment.

In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of $100 dollars a week because I didn't feel I could tell Meredith's doctor father I was making less.

ABC wouldn't be a player in the news major leagues until the 1970s, when Roone Arledge brought to ABC News the energy and programming approach he had applied to ABC Sports.

We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.

You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.

Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.

In 1989, a lone and still-anonymous Chinese student stood unarmed in front of a Chinese tank and gave the world an enduring image of the determination of China's young to change their nation. He didn't text message the tank or share a video on YouTube.

My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s.

The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.

I'm the father of three daughters, and they're all highly trained professionals. Two of them are mothers, and the other one wants to be at some point.

There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.

People are beginning to doubt the moral certitude of people on the right, especially the far right.

I think obviously we need to work harder at extending the women's movement. How do women who have prepared for careers and have a child get back to the workplace and still fulfill maternal roles?

I would say that we have not completely cracked the code of the '60s. We are still finding our way through that time.

“What ‘relations of production’ in capitalist society represented for Karl Marx, ‘relations of definition’ represent for risk society. Both concern relations of domination (Beck 2002; Goldblatt 1996). Among the relations of definition are the rules, institutions and capabilities which specify how risks are to be identified in particular contexts (for example, within nation-states, but also in relations between them). They form at the legal, epistemological and cultural power matrix in which risk politics is organized (see chapters 9 and 10). Relations of definition power can accordingly be explored through four clusters of questions:” 

“The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but about the positive side effects of bads.” 

“Climate risk teaches us that the nation is not the centre of the world.” 

“Change in society, social change, routinizes a key concept in sociology. Everyone knows what it means. Change brings a characteristic future of modernity into focus, namely permanent transformation, while basic concepts and the certainties that support them remain constant. Metamorphosis, by contrast, destabilizes these certainties of modern society. It shifts the focus to ‘being in the world’ and ‘seeing the world’, to events and processes which are unintended, which generally go unnoticed, which prevail beyond the domains of politics and democracy as side effects of radical technical and economic modernization. They trigger a fundamental shock, a sea change which explodes the anthropological constants of our previous existence and understanding of the world. Metamorphosis in this sense means simply that what was unthinkable yesterday is real and possible today.” 

“In all previously existing democracies, there have been two types of authority: one coming from the people and the other coming from the enemy. Enemy stereotypes empower. Enemy stereotypes have the highest conflict priority. They make it possible to cover up and force together all the other social antitheses. One could say that enemy stereotypes constitute an alternative energy source for consensus, a raw material becoming scarce with the development of modernity. They grant exemption from democracy by its own consent [143].” 

We do not yet have the solutions to these questions, but the awareness that we live in an endangered world is present in more and more life situations.

You could say that we are living in an internally globalized country.

You cannot make peace with terrorists. The normal dividing lines between war and peace do not apply.

When they come to Europe, they are confronted by still closed borders. Thus, the concept of open borders is a very selective concept, one that is not taken seriously at all in the experience of non-Europeans.

Western countries in particular can today no longer be separated from Muslim societies, because they have them within themselves. They are themselves internally globalized.

We are living in a world that is beyond controllability.

This experience actually means the very opposite: the largest military power was unable to stop such a sensitive attack and will be unable to rule out such a possibility in the future. Precisely this is the background to the United States' military interventions.

The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous.

The idea that you surrender your identity when you relinquish national powers is unhelpful. No, indeed, precisely the opposite is the case: if done in an intelligent way, you attain the sovereignty to better solve national problems in cooperation with others.

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

That was the first major social sciences conference at which social scientists from all cultures wanted to reach a consensus on whether we can continue to pursue a national course in the social sciences or whether we need a cosmopolitan path that also connects us in a new way.

Relinquishing apparent national sovereignty does not have to entail a loss of national sovereignty, but can actually be a benefit.

Nonetheless, we continue to be obsessed with finding or inventing a European nation which, as in the nation state, guarantees homogeneity and thus an appropriate form of democracy and centralized government.

Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law nor even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally.

Initially, the horrific images of September 11th triggered an enormous wave of solidarity.