You know, all these sentiments about beauty coming from within, they've always resonated when I've read them, but it takes a bit of living to truly appreciate them. To realise we are so much more than our experiences, that we are who we are because of the lessons we've learnt, now that's what true 'beauty' is for me.

When I was 18, and my looks were what I was - and all that I was - it did feel very limiting.

I remember doing a shoot for Herb Ritts, hanging off the Eiffel Tower - that wasn't your usual day at the office. It was terrifying, and in the end, you couldn't really tell how high I was because the photographer was scared of heights, so he was quite far away from me.

Getting older is baggage for so many people but I don't spend time on things I can't control. Wrinkles don't scare me; they're a part of life, and I will and do embrace them, but I look at surgery, and that scares me.

Fashion is all about references. All these names being thrown around.

I was a regular kid with a normal family life.

I almost had to exhaust myself at modeling before I could say, 'O.K., I'm ready for school.'

Yoga has been the best tool for managing stress and life's challenges. Everything from my studies to my father's death was eased by my practice of it.

I haven't left modeling completely; I just took a step out, and I now have the rare luxury of picking and choosing how to spend my days.

I was really gangly and uncoordinated as a kid. I couldn't even do a cartwheel.

Walking strengthens my legs, and I swing my arms to tone my upper body.

On average, African-American women are 4 times as likely to die from pregnancy related complications. Latina women are at 2 times greater risk.

America's health care system is the most complicated and expensive in the world.

When 1970s feminism hit the United States, women demanded the right to natural childbirth and to have their husband or another support person in the delivery room. My mother gave birth to me during this time.

May is the month when people focus on mothers more than any other time of year.

Even though Haitian women are considered the 'poto mitan' - the 'central pillars' of the family and their communities - they are often the most underserved members of already poor communities.

We're living in miraculous times where connections are made at the blink of an eye, the tap of a thumb, and the click of a mouse. We can never replace human interaction, but these simple actions can be powerful and meaningful to those we connect with.

In parts of the world where basic infrastructures like paved roads and transportation systems are underdeveloped, people walk for days to reach a health care provider.

In the world of maternal health, cell phone technology is being used to provide prenatal care, linking pregnant women to health care providers when they can't otherwise reach healthcare facilities.

This globalization is lifting up hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The Left needs to see that.

Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic.

It's important to remember that, in the 1930s, a lot of people in the West looked at communism as a pretty good idea. That was partly because they didn't know how bad things were on the communist side of the world, but it was also partly because things were bad in the West.

The main point of democracy is to deliver positive results for the majority.

Sometimes, the aftermath is more devastating than the storm. That is the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It was disastrous at the time, but what has been worse is how long it has lingered.

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

Thanks to globalization and the technology revolution, the nature of work, the distribution of the rewards from that work, and maybe even the economic cycle itself are being transformed.

This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.

The high-tech, globalized capitalism of the 21st century is very different from the postwar version of capitalism that performed so magnificently for the middle classes of the Western world.

Corporations are not employment agencies, and judging them by that metric is a mistake.

It's public knowledge that there have been efforts - as U.S. intelligence sources have said - by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and, indeed, other Western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us.

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

Defending human rights should be an important objective of foreign policy, and that, too, will sometimes be hard to reconcile with an economic agenda, especially when it comes to dealing with rich but repressive players like China and Russia.

When I was a kid in junior high, I had an assignment to discuss how to rescue poor people in India. I remember my teacher at the time considered it an impossible problem. Now, we're not talking that way anymore. We're sure not talking about that for China. They're rescuing themselves thanks to globalization.

People don't just want to be rich and successful, they want to be good.

Sometimes who is going to be taking care of all of my kids on any given day is more complicated than any trade agreement.

Most of the conversation about how geopolitics is changing in the 21st century focuses on the shift from west to east and on how we're moving from the bipolar power equation of the Cold War to a new bipolar relationship, that of the U.S. and China, that determines the mood music for everyone else.

Plutocrats were the chief beneficiaries of so-called neoliberalism and the suite of political changes it brought beginning in the late 1970s - deregulation, weaker protection for unions, the shareholder value movement, and the subsequent inflation of executive compensation.

Plutocrats worldwide have readily understood the advantages of evading the burdens of the nation-state.

If you believe in democracy, than you can't trash it by being cynical about the people who do democracy: the politicians.

The triumph of economic liberalization has coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

In America, we have equated personal business success with public virtue.

This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult.

I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium.

Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth.

Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality - financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.

As companies become bigger, the global environment more competitive, and the rate of disruptive technological innovation ever faster, the value to shareholders of attracting the best possible CEO increases correspondingly.

Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons - including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay - but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.

One consequence of Russia's klepto-capitalist model is the growing appeal of government jobs, with their lucrative opportunities for payoffs.