I came away from space flight realising that I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Life is so amazing. When you look at the universe and the forces of nature, there just has to be a creator.

Children are bought and sold like animals, sometimes at a lower price than animals. 168 million children work as child labourers, more than 200 million children who should be in education are not at school.

We've had hierarchical and bureaucratic structures as far back as we can go in human history. The Chinese civil service goes back to at least 2000BC and militaries have always been structured as hierarchical. Modern bureaucracy is a mash-up of two ideas. Firstly, the command and control structures which have been core to organized human activity for millennia and secondly, the principles of industrial economics.

Cyber-threat is the single most serious threat faced by the markets. Many countries cannot complete with the United States in conventional military warfare, but in the cyber wars? They can go toe to toe. This is what we call 'asymmetric' warfare where adversaries have been able to level the playing field.

We need to be responsible adults, yet society is- at best- irresponsible adolescents. Our society isn't worried about long-term consequences, it's 'live for today, party now, forget about the hangover...'

Connection is why we're here. It gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The ability to feel connected is neurobiologically wired into us.

The artificiality and unsustainability comes in when loans are made to customers who cannot repay those loans, and without sufficient regulatory control.

You must surround yourself with great people, and as you grow, never forget the generosity gene. You must demonstrate that gene with encouragement, praise, recognition, and cash... Building a great team is what this business game is all about. The team with the best players working together wins.

Every person is different, but every sale is the same. The question is, where does the person start out on the certainty continuum?

The representative agent model (and its descendants) imposed a straightjacket that made it difficult to think clearly about what was going on [in the economy]… To me [Stiglitz], the strangest aspect of modern macroeconomics was that the central banks were using a model in which banks and financial markets played no role.

There are various forms of hostage-taking, each with distinct characteristics. Broadly speaking, one can categorise them into political and criminal hostage-takings. Political hostage-taking involves abducting someone to gain a political leverage—this is the first type. The second type is criminal hostage-taking, where the motive is ransom.

Every single individual in the world, including you and I, have a grievance or a problem at any given moment in time. When you and I go to sleep tonight in our own beds, you'll be thinking about a problem that's affecting you and I'll be thinking about a problem that's affecting me.