Society

A single super large combo meal at any popular hamburger outlet will contain a full day's worth of calorie intake. When one sees such meals being purchased and eaten, one wonders whether the individual concerned is going to consume only water for the next 24 hours.

Unknown.

We are in the midst of a pandemic of eating too much (the overweight and obesity pandemic) and a pandemic of not having enough to eat (the under nutrition and hunger pandemic). Roughly 1.6 billion people in the world are affected by the first pandemic and roughly 1 billion people in the world today are affected by the second pandemic.

Unknown.

HIV/AIDS is the greatest pandemic in human history. It is chronic pandemic, in the sense that its rise and fall is measured in decades. The known part of this pandemic is now three decades old, and it has several decades still to run.

Unknown.

In order to censor YouTube, for example, countries like Turkey and Pakistan had to block access to the whole site; it's not practical just to block selected content.

Unknown.

[the impact of the internet on liberty and free speech has been] very positive indeed – not so much two steps forward and one step back, as ten steps forward for every step back. By breaking the oligopoly of the established press and letting everyone be a publisher, it has made information much harder for the powerful to control.

Unknown.

Every country that has managed to raise its standards of living has somehow integrated itself commercially with the rest of the world, it's probably a necessary condition.

Leading economist specializing in European monetary integration and financial crises.

Taxes are the price of civilisation.

Supreme Court Justice; Major Legal Scholar & Reformer

The group found that, on average, people living in Manhattan travel 2.5 miles most days, compared to five miles in Los Angeles. But we also found that when you look at the longest trips people make, people that live in New York go significantly further, 69 miles on a weekday compared to 29 in Los Angeles

Unknown.

During the twentieth century we saw consumption boom beyond the planets natural limits, beyond what the planet is capable of sustaining. Everything is connected, forest destruction is a major cause of global warming, climate change.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.

Environmental activist & former Executive Director of Greenpeace International

This has been a heart-wrenching day, and I will never forget the destruction and suffering that I have witnessed. I have visited the scenes of many natural disasters around the world, but nothing like this. The scale is so large: so many people, in so many places, in so much need…

Former UN Secretary-General, served two five-year terms.

It is not an exaggeration to say that most of our fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.

Psychologist & Founder of Positive Psychology Movement

The result would be immediately one of the greatest catastrophes since World War II. Hundreds of thousands would die. It would cause trillions of dollars of immediate economic damage as buildings were vaporised. The real damage, though, would come in the days and weeks after, when there would undoubtedly be a global panic.

Nuclear weapons expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund.

Innovation is not about products or scientific laboratories- it is also about governance, education and everything we do as people. It is not about scientists alone innovating.

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

Telecommunications has connected India- and has brought about openness, accessibility, connectivity, networking, democratisation, decentralisation and as a result- social transformation.

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

When I entered the telecom scene in India, in the early nineteen eighties, we had two million telephones for seven hundred and fifty million people. It used to take fifteen years to get a telephone connection. In a very short space of time, just twenty five years, we have seven hundred and fifty million telephones. We are adding ten million every month, month after month, and for the first time in the history of India- we are a connected nation of over a billion people.

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy