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I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.

I remember being young in the 1960s... we had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.

If you were an optimistic teen, then you'll be an optimist at 80. People's reactions to bad events are highly stable over a half century or more.

We've gone from, in the '50s and '60s, being very optimistic about the future, where the future is all spaceships and The Jetsons and flying cars, to where we were just sure the future was going to be a massive pile of rubble.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

When I was born in 1942, World War II was still going. And I began to realize when I became a young adult that if we don't teach our kids a better way of relating to their fellow human beings, the very future of humanity on the planet is in jeopardy.

Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.

There have been two periods in my lifetime when the excitement of government and of public issues drew to Washington many of the bright young people graduating from colleges and law schools. These were essentially the Roosevelt and the Kennedy years.

Dwight Eisenhower warned American citizens at the end of his presidency about the implications of the military-industrial complex and its influence over government. We have now gone well beyond any of the wildest imaginations that could have entered Eisenhower's mind.