“When you start questioning and be mindfully aware of your thoughts, you realise that you are an observer of your thoughts, not the originator. You can then extend that observer experience to emotions, sensations, perceptual experience and every aspect of mental space.”
— Deepak Chopra
Wellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality

The quote archive

Wisdom in fragments

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

The most important thing a leader has to have is an idea on where they want to go and the ability to bring people with them. Most discussion about leadership is about styles and characteristics, but the most important thing is having a clear sense — and a right sense — of where you want to go.

— Steve Ballmer

Former CEO of Microsoft & Owner of Los Angeles Clippers

Never was wealth the driver for me. – it was always hey, there's a cool idea here, let's make something of it. It was nice to be well rewarded, but the interesting part was working the problem, thinking about new things and how to bring them forward from being ideas to being products or new ways of doing things.

— Steve Ballmer

Former CEO of Microsoft & Owner of Los Angeles Clippers

British identity is profoundly tied-up with Europe and vice-versa.

— Brendan Simms

Historian specializing in German history and British foreign policy

For over 40 years however, we've fostered trade and investment relationships because we're in the EU. A lot of investment has flowed into the UK because we're in the EU; Nissan in the North-East, Toyota in the Midlands and other prospective investors such as Hitachi.

— Andrew Sentance

Former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee Member & Economist

Economic integration doesn't remove a country's identity, far from it… rather the range of products, services, instruments and intellectual processes available increases. You keep what you have and add things from abroad. This is not reducing identity, but expanding it.

— Catherine Mann

It's differences in tastes and preferences, resources and technology together with ways of thinking (manifesting in managerial and design differences) which are the reasons countries benefit when they trade with each other in goods, services, finance and labour.

— Catherine Mann

The EU needs reform. Countries have transferred jurisdiction over legislations to a centre that makes decisions in somewhat of a vacuum, featuring a European Parliament that cannot itself initiate legislation. We have a paradox therefore where national parliaments give certain powers to the centre, without being compensated through the creation of an essential federal sovereignty.

— Yanis Varoufakis

Greek Finance Minister during eurozone debt crisis negotiations

We were approaching the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.

— Marshall McLuhan

Media Theorist Who Predicted the Digital Age & Global Communication

The last century has witnessed a radical transformation in the entire human environment, largely as a result of the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences upon technology.

— Lewis Mumford

Influential American historian, philosopher, and social critic of technology and urbanism

The Internet is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies, it's becoming our typewriter and our printing press, our map and our clock, our calculator and our telephone, our post office and our library, our radio and our TV.

— Nicholas Carr

Technology writer & author of "The Shallows" and "The Big Switch

Electronic systems change not only what we know, but how we know it.

— Richard Posner

Influential Federal Judge & Law and Economics Scholar

We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.

— Michel Foucault

Influential Philosopher of Power, Knowledge, and Discourse in Modern Society

Child labour is one of the worst violations of human rights, it's an affirmation that we don't respect the freedom and dignity of children in our society.

— Kailash Satyarthi

Nobel Peace Prize Winner & Child Rights Activist Against Child Labor

In our market-economy, consumers have the power. I also believe that almost every consumer has an element of compassion in herself or himself.

— Kailash Satyarthi

Nobel Peace Prize Winner & Child Rights Activist Against Child Labor

In a world where we have 168 million full-time child labourers, we have just over 200 million adults who are jobless. Studies have shown empirically that there is a parallel between child labour and adult unemployment.

— Kailash Satyarthi

Nobel Peace Prize Winner & Child Rights Activist Against Child Labor

We have come to consider children as either being exploited or subject to charity; we hardly ever consider them as the equal human beings they are, born with certain inalienable rights.

— Kailash Satyarthi

Nobel Peace Prize Winner & Child Rights Activist Against Child Labor