From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Children are the future of humanity. If we cannot protect our children, if we cannot ensure their rights, their education, their protection from exploitation, then we are failing humanity itself.
The gap between the situation of people caught in conflict and the rest of us is growing, not narrowing. The gap is not going to be narrowed by trying to change the words on paper, we have to live up to them.
To break the silence around sexual abuse, more people need to speak about it… normalise it… and by doing so, hopefully we can start to get our children talking, and make some real progress to eliminate these acts from our society.
Despite romantic notions about laws of war being found in on Cyrus' Cylinder, (circa 539 BC) or in the Bible's Book of Deuteronomy, effective legal frameworks didn't emerge until the latter part of the 19th Century. They began with the American Lieber Code – military law for wartime conduct applied by Abraham Lincoln to the Union side in the American Civil War – and the first Geneva Convention, followed by the Hague Conventions, and now found in the modern iteration of the Geneva Conventions and their protocols.
Think about how that feels when you're told that for this essential skill that is part of the astronaut job, you're not needed. It's as if they were saying, 'You don't bring anything essential and we won't miss you.' That encouragement pushed me to show up to spacewalking meetings I wasn't initially invited to.
More girls have been killed in the past fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century.
There is nothing, however, in standard theories of money that requires transactions to be anonymous from tax- or law-enforcement authorities. And yet there is a significant body of evidence that a large percentage of currency in most countries, generally well over 50%, is used precisely to hide transactions.
Even when I reached the top, I never forgot where I came from. I wondered about the millions of my fellow countrymen who didn't have the chance I got and continued to languish in poverty.
What makes Guantánamo so horrible is the fact that the majority of these men are innocent and have no hope of release in the future. Our government has made no concrete steps to releasing these men.
[the impact of the internet on liberty and free speech has been] very positive indeed – not so much two steps forward and one step back, as ten steps forward for every step back. By breaking the oligopoly of the established press and letting everyone be a publisher, it has made information much harder for the powerful to control.
In the United States, we had over $940 billion dollars of fraud in 2017, that's almost $1 trillion. There isn't enough law enforcement in the world to deal with that.
The real tragedy is that we have become so accustomed to injustice that we no longer recognize it when we see it. We've normalized inequality, normalized discrimination, normalized the idea that some people matter less than others.