Wisdom in fragments

Storytelling is an extraordinary powerful human skill that all of us are wired for; but its best used in the service of ideas.

Curator of TED Talks & Author of "The Long Tail

More than one hundred million have been uprooted in the first eighty years of the twentieth century- millions permanently displaced as a result of revolutions, division of countries, annexations or boundary changes and other territorial arrangements. The political refugee has become the symbol of worldwide political and social change.

A refugee, we might say, is a person fleeing life-threatening conditions. In daily parlance and for journalist purposes this is roughly the meaning of refugeehood. Predictably, in legal and political circles, among those officials who formulate refugee policies for states and international agencies, the meaning is considerably more circumscribed.

The twentieth century has been called the century of the homeless man. The number of persons permanently displaced for political reasons as a result of wars, treaties or sometimes obscure reason is startling.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

Chilean-American Writer & Human Rights Activist, Author of "Death and the Maiden

The 'Silicon Valley' mindset is one where you race ahead and build technology, and if people adopt it and use it, you scale. Success in this mindset is measured in terms of numbers of users, revenue and valuation. How do these measures illustrate social good though?

CEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation

Technologies are emerging and moving so fast, that it's very hard to build accountability mechanisms; not least because technologies can become ubiquitous before we understand them.

CEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation

We don't currently have the accountability mechanisms in our digital life that we do in our physical life.

CEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation

The systems we now use exist at a scale that's actually hard to comprehend as human beings. On Facebook, you are one of several billion people and at that scale, it's easy to become a number, or simply a wallet.

CEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation

There is no healthy society without a healthy internet.

CEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation

The military have always done a great job of creating this band of brothers – groups who are so close-knit they very literally behave like family, and from an evolutionary perspective- we're wired to do anything to protect our family.

If we want to live and become 100 years old, we need to have parents and grandparents that have lived that long- that's it. There's not much we can do in terms of environmental influence, eating well, and living well – those things help of course but to get to great age, you need the genes.

You can't just roll out of bed and be the best in the world at something, you need to have great genes and put in the hard-work, get the breaks, and really have that balance of nature and nurture.

Understanding superhumans is to understand human potential. We have this immense potential which isn't always fulfilled individually, or as a species. I wanted to grab that by the scruff of the neck and write something positive about the best we can be.

I remember one day though, conversing with a primatologist and saying, 'oh, animals are just like us… we're not that special…' and he said, 'well, when did chimps build their own large hadron collider?' – I was gob smacked. That one comment made me realise how absurd it is to claim we aren't that different from other animals because, clearly, we're amazingly different.

Another hugely common mistake is optimising your business for investors, and not customers and employees.

Founder of Moz, SEO software company and industry thought leader