I’m very happy about it. You know, a kid from the Hill being elected to the Hall of Fame. Proud of it.

I’m proud, that despite many tough moments, with lots of injuries, I never gave up and made it to the top of an Olympic podium.

I am of course honoured to get this recognition for all the work I’ve done over the years, but I’m also proud for my family and for my native country and my adopted country, and especially for Turkey it’s quite important.

proud of recognizing that as a scientist, it was not only important to do research and find new things. I also felt a responsibility to apply them for the benefit of society.

It is simplistic in the following sense that you cannot institute democracy from above. It’s a very difficult process. And democracy is not the only dimension of institutions that matters. Although my work does emphasise that democracy by itself matters as well. But the problem is really alive today in the industrialised world, where you would think, and many political scientists have claimed that democracy is safe and secure and would never be under threat. It is under threat. Support for democracy is at an all time low, not just in the US, although really jarringly in the US but not just in the US, throughout the western world. So democracy is not easy to make work because democracy is about democratic citizenship. It’s about consensus, it’s about communication. It’s about accepting defeat, making compromises, talking and understanding the other side. All of those things are always difficult. They become more difficult during times of turbulence, which, you know, we are living through and they become harder when the infrastructure, for example, the communication infrastructure, makes this sort of democratic citizenship harder, which I think is not the only factor. But social media has certainly played that role.