Wisdom in fragments

Instead of looking at hoarded cash as being a 'rainy day fund' we need to view these balances as stores of economic growth. This cash represents potential investments, new jobs, new innovations and the potential for significant wealth creation and diffusion.

What on earth they [referring to government] will do next…

As far as I'm concerned any business that's up and running within an hour of having mortar [attacks shows remarkable resilience].

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

Bill Gates of Microsoft is on-record as saying, 'Microsoft would not function as a company in the way that it does without operations in Israel.'

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

What's remarkable about Israel's economy is that in the last few years we have situations which, in any other country, would have been totally disruptive. The incredible thing is that none of these threats have a measurable impact on our economy!

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

Israel is not called 'the start-up nation' for nothing. We have great statistics to show the number of start-ups per capita, the number of PhD's per capita, V/C Dollars per capita, Patents per capita and more. Israel creates a huge amount of innovative start-ups which are often bought out before they are even revenue producing!

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

During the crisis and immediately thereafter the focus was less on infrastructure and more on, 'I need to find a manager, any manager, who can make some damn money!'

I think transparency in this sense is a red-herring. A multi-strategy hedge fund could give an investor or the SEC it's daily trade blotter and accomplish 'transparency,' and the recipient would have no idea what to make of the trades.

After Amaranth, I think to a significant extent, the business side became more important and of greater focus for institutional investors than the investment side.

Hedge funds don't have that asymmetric risk profile problem because, in general, the interests of the hedge fund managers are aligned with their investors. I think only people who are pandering to perceived public passions are blaming hedge funds for the financial crisis.

I personally think that it's only the ignorant and populism pandering politicians who treat the hedge fund industry as a scapegoat for the financial crisis. It was the extremely heavily regulated investment banks who, risking their shareholders' money, levered their firms up to 40:1!

I think it's down to what Jeremy Bentham said which is, '…the question is not can they reason? Or can they talk? …But can they suffer?'

Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

They have maternal instincts and look after each other as we do… it's not an intellectual thing when a mother protects her child; it's an instinctive behaviour. We value all those things in the human being because we are human beings! But that's pretty short sighted and narrow minded.

Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

To me the question is, why are we denying them the obvious rights they should have? They are flesh and blood, they feel pain as we do, they experience joy, they have their own behaviours and their own languages among themselves that they understand and we don't.

Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

Early stage investing is very difficult and financially risky meaning that a lot of what we invest in won't work. A lot of what we do is, in effect, pilots to see if individual projects or funds can generate some positive return.

In the same way that business entrepreneurship has transformed industry since the early 1970's, social entrepreneurship can transform the social sector by having people who are willing to take risks and innovate to help address social issues.