What I learned from 9/11 that is really important, first and foremost, you have to motivate all the workers and understand that they've left their families to help clean up a pretty awful situation. Every time you have an emergency management situation, it's all about teamwork.
If you don't have a functioning financial system the world economy won't be revived. All the major economies have their responsibility to assist at a pace which is required to clean up the balance sheet of the banking system and to ensure that credit flows are resumed.
Without a doubt, first thing we should do is clean up our fiscal house, and that starts with balancing our budgets and digging out of this red ink. We cannot expect to continue in this fashion and remain the leader of the free world.
Disasters happen. We still have no way to eliminate earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, floods or droughts. We cope as best we can by fortifying ourselves against danger with building codes and levees, and by setting aside money to clean up afterwards.
Hearing the Beastie Boys speak out against sexism made me feel like if these men who had once sung about getting girls to 'do the laundry' and 'clean up my room' could understand, maybe the rest of the world would follow suit. It made me hopeful in the best way.
When you get to know me, I don't despair - I just get up, clean up, and start again.
Along with my passion for horse breeding, I was a horse racing enthusiast... In 1974 I was elected as a committee member and subsequently as a steward of the Turf Club. I had a burning desire to clean up the sport, which had always carried the stigma of gambling and manipulation.
We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way.
I don't think it's too hippie to want to clean up the planet so you don't wind up dying of some kind of cancer when you're 45 years old. It enrages me that these big cancer-research organizations can't be bothered to man the front lines of environmental protest.
One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own resources go. That includes not only material resources, but psychological resources: the commitment of time and a portion of your mind to something when you'd rather be doing something else.