From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Backlash is sadly an intrinsic part of social progress. When oppressed people make their claim for justice, they trigger a response – a fightback by those who want to maintain the status-quo.
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.
If you're going to be a city of love and compassion, you're going to have to develop economics infrastructure, capital planning and job creation policies, complementing them with education. For those who feel left out, we have to bring them in, and have that conversation with every company, every worker, and fight for them to be part of the more complicated world.
The vast majority of fraudsters, and criminals get caught not because of good police work, but because they continue doing the same thing over and over again, until someone notices.
Countries that criminalise LGBT+ people are losing tourist revenue because LGBT+ tourists and their straight friends and families won't go to such countries. There is also a very significant brain-drain from countries that victimise LGBT+ people.
We weren't involved in politics and had nothing to do with the government. But they took everything we had, our seven companies and the company plane. And it's a miracle they didn't kill us.
Probably most importantly was the ability of Brazil to deal with a problem we inherited from colonial times- inequality.
Cyberspace has had a profoundly positive impact on humanity, but has also been abused, as a playground for criminals already used by some as a battle-space.
They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would never see my family again.
To break the silence around sexual abuse, more people need to speak about it… normalise it… and by doing so, hopefully we can start to get our children talking, and make some real progress to eliminate these acts from our society.
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. We must strengthen our notion of children's rights within our cultures and societies.
The people who started working at Chobani... the minute they had a job, the minute they started working, that's when they lost the sense of being a refugee and became part of the community. That was the moment they started to regain their dignity and became independent.