Wisdom in fragments

The most common mistake is to stop challenging when things are going well. I recognise failure as not having made a business better than when you were first involved.

Terra Firma Capital founder; acquired EMI Records in 2007

Playing chess, I learned the dramatic effect combining humans and machines. Humans have intuition, can recognise patterns and positions, and machines have brute-force of calculation and memory. By bringing these capabilities together in other walks of life, we can achieve incredible results.

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

We cannot think about technology in confrontational terms. There is no race against the machines, there is no fight, no war. We have to end this long, historical confrontational narrative.

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

People like Trump rally people behind them by pointing out threats; these may be real, but most likely are imaginary or inflated. Then he says, 'only I can protect you.'

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

If you offer no vision for the future, someone else will. Our geopolitics cannot tolerate a vacuum, and if you retreat- whether physically or ideologically- someone else will come up with a plan which may not be complementary for democracy.

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

History is not linear, like the chapters of a book… History moves through seasons, and so winters are inevitable.

World Chess Champion & Political Activist Against Russian Authoritarianism

Entrepreneurs are people who by nature are optimists, who can tolerate risk and who have huge curiosity.

CEO of Apple Computer Company during the 1980s and 1990s

Kodak had been living in linear-time, something which is intuitive to most of us, where we think in days, weeks, months, years… The world had already started to shift when people like Steve Jobs started to take-advantage of the fact that you could connect the dots.

CEO of Apple Computer Company during the 1980s and 1990s

Here was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates- two young guys, under the age of 30, talking about their noble cause of empowering knowledge workers with tools for the mind, making them incredibly productive, and helping them to change the way things were done in our world; creating entirely new industries in the process.

CEO of Apple Computer Company during the 1980s and 1990s

To scale? you have the stars aligned- timing is everything.

CEO of Apple Computer Company during the 1980s and 1990s

Entrepreneurship means the unrelenting belief that there has to be a better way.

CEO of Apple Computer Company during the 1980s and 1990s

It's almost like we have the left eye covering itself up and saying, 'nothing to see here, nothing to do with Islam', and the right eye bursting a blood vessel saying, 'it's all Islam, it's all Muslims', and Islamists saying that the divine inspiration for them is from above.

The question I always ask them is '…what has our foreign policy got to do with Muslims travelling thousands of miles to go and kill other Muslims in Iraq and Syria?'

Salman Abedi, Khalid Masood, Khuram Butt, all of these people and the people in ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab… We tend to think sometimes that they are extremism. But the reality is they didn't breed extremism. Islamist extremism bred them.

Extremism is the desire to enforce illiberal views which are in a dichotomy to the liberal values that we all adhere to in a Liberal secular democracy; and you can have non-violent or violent extremism.

Doing something which has a social purpose gives you the motivation to overcome the hurdles and obstacles that you will meet along the way. It gives you that inner strength when you're doing something and you know it's making a massive difference.