My early experience as an unaccompanied child refugee on the Kindertransport brought me to England in 1939, evading Nazi Europe. That really had an enormous impact on me, everything was different. It was such a big change, that change doesn't throw me anymore. I've learned to enjoy change, I like to do new things, make new things happen.

If you want to see where human nature is most revealed, you have to look at human beings in their most stressful and painful scenarios. It is in those situations that you can learn how people behave and how you can behave.

I'm very old-fashioned in the sense that I still feel you need a strong manufacturing sector in your economy. I was saying that in the late 1970's and early 80's and people just laughed at me. I think my day is about to turn.

Chairman Bernanke, as good as he is academically, and as much integrity as he has (which I believe is unlimited), has an analytical framework that suggests a lot more inflation is allowable. Part of this is because he looks at core rather than headline, which is a flawed calculus.

The cost of inaction far exceeds the cost of action. Every day we delay comprehensive HIV programs, we're not just counting dollars - we're counting lives.

So not only has average pay gone down, but the job has got riskier.

I cannot argue that my own interests are special simply because I'm me and you're not and expect that you will take me seriously. The nature of logic forces us to cede our own pre-eminence, because there is nothing in the pronoun 'you' or 'he' or 'she' which confers some special status.

If our future is to count as a utopia, we cannot allow a massive oppressed class of hyper-sentient, uncomfortable digital beings. We want it to be good for all kinds of minds.

San Francisco is the city of love and compassion, will always be, and will never change that.

The reason we can't be happy, and not worry about other people's opinions, is that we're sharing our minds with a machine that does worry about other people's opinions and which does get anxious. If we can dissociate from that, and learn to manage it, it can improve our lives significantly.

Emotions are the brain's way of making us pay attention immediately to what is most important so that we can react as quickly as possible. In evolution, that meant 'survival' – the rustle in the bushes may be our next meal or may make us its next meal – something that we have to chase, or run away from – and in either case, we don't want to have to stop and think.

It's always been the job of comedy to point out hypocrisies and problems – it's a long historical tradition that goes all the way back to Aristotle and Jonathan Swift.