Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei

"I think that is the most important lesson you learn in life, that you have to be ready to make a compromise. You do not compromise your principles, but you have to be ready to compromise. You have to understand that you cannot get your way 100 percent. Life is too complicated. You are not an island, and you work in a social setting, and you need to understand that you work always -- at the family level, at the society level -- to work out the compromise that is perceived to be fair. You don't get 100 percent of what you want, but at least you will get the basic minimum that you require."

"Whatever we do in life, whether privately or publicly, we need to have a compass. We need to be sure that what we do is not only good for us, but good for the people at large. That's ethics. That's morality. I think we need to always know that our work is not just good for us in the short term, but it's morally correct."

"My children grew up in six countries. They were born in Geneva. They went to grammar school in New York. They went to high school in Vienna. They went to college in London. They went to graduate schools in the U.S., and now they are working both in London. So for them, they are absolutely color-blind. They are absolutely religious-blind. They are absolutely ethnic-blind. For them, home is the world. For them, every human being is just one member of that large human family you have."

"People forget the positive aspect of nuclear (energy) because what they see in the media all the time is the negative aspects of nuclear, is the agency role as a watch dog, as it is called. They forget that we still get 16 percent of the world's electricity from nuclear energy. They forget that we need nuclear energy, at least for the next 50 years, because we only have nuclear energy and fossil fuel: gas and coal. And gas and coal have their own problems -- climate change -- and nuclear, of course, has the risk of a severe accident. But we need both. We need to weigh the costs and benefits. We need to understand the benefits outweigh the cost."

"I went to Nigeria recently, and I compare that with the U.S. In the U.S., every American has 16,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is enough, obviously, to empower your refrigerators, your air-conditioning, your iPods, everything you need. In Nigeria, they have 70 kilowatt hours per year. That translates into an 8-watt light bulb."

"We cannot erect walls between the north and the south, between the rich and the poor. We need to make sure that we have an equitable world, where every human being has the right to live a decent life, the right to live a life free from fear, the right to be able to send his kids to have education, the right to have Social Security in their old age. If you do that, I think the insecurities we feel -- the extremists that we are seeing -- will drop absolutely dramatically."

"We need to understand that, before deciding to go to war, that we have exhausted every other possibility of reaching our differences through peaceful means."

"I think I have come to realize that it's not really poverty that drives people bananas. It's really a sense of injustice. There's a lot of poor people around the world, but when you repress the right of people to speak, when people fear that they are not being justly treated -- and you see a lot of that in the Middle East, you see a lot of that in the Muslim world -- I think people are getting it both ways. They are getting it from their government when they feel that they are repressed by their government -- they are not allowed to have the right to live in freedom and dignity -- and they are getting it from the outside world when they feel that the outside world is not fairly treating them. They wake up in the morning, and they see people dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the Palestinian territories. The sense of injustice, the sense of humiliation is very much there."

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei / Interview