We are celebrating the rights of free laboring men and women. The preservation of these rights is vitally important now, not only to us who enjoy them - but to the whole future of Christian civilisation.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

If we're going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.

If Western civilization does not now respond constructively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.

I'm so totally future oriented that, for me, I don't know what the future's about, but I can promise you it's gonna be exciting.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.