We need to shift our thinking about what government does, and what civil servants do, away from this relentless focus on policy and ideology and onto project management and problem solving.

Our brain was designed for survival and was developed in the 99.9% of human history that occurred before culture and civilisation. As a result, there are situations in our lives today where the brain doesn't work so-well. We call this an emotional hijack.

We have a blind spot about the ways in which the things we innocently buy and use actually are decaying the environment we depend on, the global systems that support life on the planet. We are super-monkeys- super because of the technology, and our monkeys because our brains haven't kept up with the change.

We scrutinise a photograph with a sense that we are scrutinising the actual objects themselves, although they are distanced from us in time and space.

We have taught them they are American, Indian or African. Children have never created borders, religions, faiths or caste systems. Children have not been responsible for wars and divisions in society- we did that… and now we're imposing on our children, from their birth, a divisive image of who they are. We need to learn from children, and learn simplicity, forgiveness and the beauty of life.

If someone can take our findings and draw out additional insights, we consider it a triumph. Our aim is to constantly enhance our understanding of the world, and contributions from others are invaluable in this pursuit.

The real mystery is not why organisms as complicated as us age and die, but why there is a kind of immortality through the germ line! There clearly is some way that all the damaging aspects of life that feed into ageing are overcome in the germ line.

The silence I employ has agency behind it. I choose to use it strategically as the pause between stimulus and response, differentiating a considered response from a mere reaction. We need more of this kind of silence.

Here I am the fool looking to fail frequently. I want to either hit a homerun or walk or even strike out. This means I fail far more often than I succeed. But the important point is that what I lose when I fail is trivial, epsilon compared to what I make when I succeed.

The first thing I'd say is to quote an old saying by William Goldman which is, 'in this business, nobody knows anything' – otherwise it would be sure fire and completely fail-safe!

You can have many great actors but you have very few who really become movie stars. It is that indefinable quality of someone who becomes iconic that people want to come and watch regardless of the type of film they're in.

Your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. When we're being useful and doing what we love, there's a sense of bliss. It's that moment where you say, 'This is why I'm alive. This is reason enough to be alive, right here.'