“Television tells us everyday that we live in a world we don't understand. And yet in the main it does little to explain that world. It tells us of new products that make the products we have either old-fashioned or obsolete. Above all, if today we are aware of how fast the world around us is changing, it's because television acts as a relentless reminder of that fact.”

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)
Context: There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent

Immer von Beckett ist eine technische Reduktion bis zum äußersten. … Aber diese Reduktion ist ja wirklich das was die Welt aus uns macht … das heißt die Welt aus uns gemacht diese Stümpfe von Menschen also diese Menschen die eigentlich ihr ich ihr verloren haben die sind wirklich die Produkte der Welt in der wir leben.
"Beckett and the Deformed Subject" (Lecture)

royalcorrespondent.com http://royalcorrespondent.com/2013/02/15/an-interview-with-his-majesty-king-carl-xvi-gustaf-of-sweden/

"School strike for climate - save the world by changing the rules" https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/greta-speeches#greta_speech_tedx, TEDxStockholm (24 November 2018)
2018

1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989), Farewell Address (1989)

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 9, 1890)
Letters

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact... that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.... in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.... The medieval world was... not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women... had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.... The situation we are presently in is much different.... sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious.... There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.