Politics

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.

Freedom without struggle is an illusion. I love problems. How we deal with problems defines who we are and what values we stand for.

Chinese Artist & Dissident; Prominent Human Rights Activist and Political Critic

Power is seized with the gun and maintained with the pen. Controlling public opinion through propaganda and misinformation is the most critical task of an authoritarian power.

Chinese Artist & Dissident; Prominent Human Rights Activist and Political Critic

The strongest characteristic of art is that it belongs to the individual. Art is an expression of individualism and the opposite of oppressive dogma.

Chinese Artist & Dissident; Prominent Human Rights Activist and Political Critic

We have to shift the focus of our discussions on Europe to trying to deal with the citizens' concerns. And I mean simple things, like 'I can't buy an iTunes record for someone living in a different country because of the geolocation requirements and copyright'.

Former President of Estonia & Cybersecurity Pioneer

I personally want to throw up every time I hear some completely senseless and baseless statement like 'we need more of Europe, not less'. It means nothing, and those slogans simply drive people crazy – It goes to show the intellectual vacuousness of the people who say them.

Former President of Estonia & Cybersecurity Pioneer

Without the existence of Europe, smaller countries like mine [Estonia] would have a difficult time to survive economically or even from a defence perspective. The internal European market is absolutely vital for the functioning of the very different economies of the continent.

Former President of Estonia & Cybersecurity Pioneer

In my case, and for many people I know, a European identity is something that was denied to us for 50 years. For 50 years, Estonia was occupied by the Soviets, and so- for us- for our people, who were under communist domination, we were comfortable and happy to take on a European identity when we gained independence.

Former President of Estonia & Cybersecurity Pioneer

Sometimes it's hard to shake the feeling that we are slipping backwards, but I'm an optimist at heart. We have a long way to go, but if history has taught us anything, it's that women rarely win anything without a fight!

Wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair & Human rights lawyer

Even if we end up with better regulations, we'll still have 300 million guns washing around the US, and that's going to be a huge problem for decades, because guns last a long time.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & New York Times Columnist

There are two key advantages of thinking of guns as a public health issue. First of all, it removes some of the emotion from the issue. Secondly it moves the debate to be about evidence; where we can empirically show what works, at what cost.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & New York Times Columnist

American history has bred a mythology of guns as being protection from an oppressive state. We're not alone however; Australia and Canada's gun ownership stems from a similar history, Switzerland has guns in almost every household- yet they haven't turned guns into this symbol of manhood in the way the US has.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & New York Times Columnist

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.