Politics

They would have to come clean about the catalogue of deception they have practised over the last 80 years.

The whole discovery that we are not alone. And that fact, which is the right of every person to know, was swept away under the curtain with the rationale for keeping technology secret.

The intrinsic disadvantage of a dictatorship is that a dictator does not get feedback, and so there is not a chance to make corrections.

Nobody is winning in this situation. Humanity is not winning. We are all losing from it.

It's not a nine-to-five job. It's a lifestyle more than a career — and by lifestyle, I don't mean a pink gin-sipping lifestyle. It's a commitment to public service.

You can never fail in a crisis if you just act now — if you just do it, and think about the cost later.

The system incentivised the promotion of individuals who could read the room — or the Hippodrome.

What they are doing is converting human choices into inevitability. But they are never inevitable.

The whole project in the twentieth century of creating a broad middle class was precisely to create a buffer for the system against the appeal of that ideology. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed — the moment it did — you could see our elites starting to roll that back.

There is hardly any positive democratic thinking in the European tradition until probably the twentieth century. It really took the First World War to get Europeans to start thinking along those lines. So it is quite recent. I think we need to understand just how fragile it is.

Hot and humid climates tend to promote a kind of right-wing, slightly authoritarian politics — because hot and humid environments are also pathogen-rich, and over thousands of years, societies in those climates have developed what scientists call behavioural immunity.

Conservatives and liberals are wandering around with different brains. They have different tools with which to apprehend the world, and therefore they are seeing different worlds — which inform the politics that emanate from that experience.

Most studies today show that our political leaning is at least 50 per cent genetic in origin — genetics is as important, if not more important, to how you vote than your cultural context, your economic context, and all the evidence you engage with in the world.

There are plenty of reasonable, moderate, reformist, liberal leaders who just don’t quite know what to do. Our book ideally will help them make that choice. That is my hope.

We have the technological means to deal with climate change. We have the technological means to deal with pandemics. This is not a technical problem. It is mostly a political problem. If we get our politics under control, the rest is fun and games.

It is the job of the prime minister or the president to persuade people that we are all in it together, and that if you fall behind, we will lend you a hand.