You live in the age of interdependence. Borders don't count for much or stop much, good or bad, anymore.
Interpretation
We are all interconnected in today's world, and geographical boundaries are becoming less significant.
This quote by William J. Clinton emphasizes the idea that in the modern era, the interdependence among nations and peoples is profound. The significance of borders has diminished in the face of globalization, as challenges and benefits transcend national boundaries, highlighting the need for cooperation and understanding in addressing shared issues.
In practice
During a lecture on globalization, you could start with this quote to emphasize our interconnectedness.
You know, there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a UFO than that they would draw Social Security... It's very important you understand this. Once you understand this, you realize this is not an episode from the X Files, and you're not more likely to see a UFO if you do certain specific things.
When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly...When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.
For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us.
There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.
Demand that your government pays more attention. It's immoral that people in Africa die like flies of diseases that no one dies of in the United States. And the more disease there is, the more political unrest there will be, leading to more Darfurs, which the U.S. will have to pay to fix.
I was not elected to produce a pile of vetoes.
You can only explain America's gun violence problem through guns, because mental illness doesn't automatically lead to violence, and it doesn't lead to violence anywhere else but America.
The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.
If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
Mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.
A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.
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