Our world is the projection of our collective insanity, and run by world-leaders who are professional thugs, gangsters and mobsters.
— Deepak ChopraWellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality
“Philosophy is not an anaesthetic, like it's just going to make the pain go away. But there is great solace in really understanding why chronic pain is difficult. Understanding those things can be consoling in itself, in part because it overcomes the isolation of illness.”— Kieran Setiya
Harvard philosophy professor specializing in ethics and meaning
The quote archive
Wisdom in fragments
A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.
You have to start questioning, and be mindfully aware of your thoughts. When you do that, you realise that you are an observer of your thoughts, not the originator.
— Deepak ChopraWellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality
You achieve your best performance by doing the best you can without having your mind clouded by drifting thoughts of what could happen when something goes wrong. That's what you train for, and your training gives you the ability to build the mental tools and programmes of action to make good decisions.
— Buzz AldrinLunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11; Second Person to Walk on Moon
In life, we all take various risks- not knowing how serious an outcome will be when we start. For so many things we do, we have to take a risk on someone else's word, with only their judgement calculating what the risk will be to us.
— Buzz AldrinLunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11; Second Person to Walk on Moon
Don't become paralysed by anticipating the unexpected. It does not pay to be worried about failure. If your mind is crowded with thoughts of what could happen, you will never achieve your best performance.
— Buzz AldrinLunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11; Second Person to Walk on Moon
Every failure has lessons it can give us- and knowing failure is possible and monitoring where you expect it to occur, allows you to divert your attention to the necessary observations and actions to carry out the positive.
— Buzz AldrinLunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11; Second Person to Walk on Moon
It was visionaries with a quest for achievement who made Apollo happen, and it seems to me that now? Our sense and spirit of adventure boils down to what we can afford, and not what we can learn or achieve by doing something.
— Buzz AldrinLunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11; Second Person to Walk on Moon
One of the greatest learnings in my life has been the fact that the sky is really not the limit, after all, there are footprints on the moon. The future of our species will see us travel further, and achieve more, than we could ever predict- so we have to keep our minds open to all possibilities.
— Buzz AldrinLunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11; Second Person to Walk on Moon
The venture capital industry exists to get capital in the hands of deserving entrepreneurs, but the data tells us that venture capitalists often have only a narrow definition of what 'deserving' means—and it often corresponds to being white and male.
— Melinda GatesCo-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate
I don't think there is anything about putting your country first that requires you to turn your back on the rest of the world. If anything, the opposite is true.
— Melinda GatesCo-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate
We can't solve problems if we don't understand them.
— Melinda GatesCo-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate
We like to think of data as being objective, but the answers we get are often shaped by the questions we ask. When those questions are biased, the data is, too.
— Melinda GatesCo-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate
In rich countries, 'innovation' often means finding a better way of doing things. But in developing countries, it can mean finding a way to do things at all.
— Melinda GatesCo-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate
If technology is just for the privileged few, then it will concentrate power in the hands of those who already have it.
— Melinda GatesCo-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate
Many of us think that you should only believe things that are true, not just things that rally your coalition, sect, or tribe. That belief is by no means universal, but it is a gift of the enlightenment.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature
We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles, sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year. At the same time, we have pizzagate, QAnon, chemtrails and 9/11 truthers.
— Steven PinkerCognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature