I believe wisdom can be seen as a beacon, guiding us towards the noble, beautiful, and authentic aspects of life. It's the mark of a wise individual to have a clear understanding of their path, a path that not only promotes positivity but also steers others towards it. Moreover, wisdom bears an element of compression, of brevity - a distillation of knowledge, capturing the core, the very essence of understanding.

More girls have been killed in the past fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century.

People who learn fast and who have some level of 'natural' talent may go home from practice early because they don't have to work as hard as others to get to their target level of achievement, but when you study super-achievers, you find that instead of going home early, they work late, and really pull-away from the crowd.

You don't pick an aesthetic in abstract – you need to have a core point, a core reason to make a film, and the form of aesthetic springs from that necessity. Everything has to relate to that core intention.

To be a happy human being, we must each have an extraordinary life and an ordinary life. We need both to be connected and happy. We were born to find what we can be extraordinary at, alongside leading our ordinary lives. The important thing is to find both lives and hold onto them.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes...

In reality, you're rarely (if ever) completely helpless, you allow yourself to be helpless. You need to take ownership of a situation, break it down into bitesize chunks and plan accordingly.

The primacy of overtly scientific approaches to understanding life has come at a tremendous cost; in some ways we see the world in shades of grey rather than in full colour.

The ice is neither left nor right, it is neither Republican nor Democrat, it is simply melting. The consequences of the sea ice melting are enormous and will be felt everywhere from Texas to China.

My maternal grandfather was exiled from Haiti and remained outspoken, highlighting the cruelty being inflicted on the Haitian population. His experience shaped me – and shaped my own mentality of being tough, resilient, picking myself up from disappointments, and continuing to move forward. We cannot be paralysed with disappointment when things don't go the way we want.

Revolution was, in a way, the original problem of political thought. Constitutionalism is a Greek answer to the problem of revolution. You want to avoid revolution? Then you need to design a constitution in a certain way—so that it's balanced and less likely to be overturned by revolution.

Technology, scale and globalisation has helped people involved in business- and led to increased incomes for many groups. The conundrum we have in society is that many of the 'less-skilled' members of the population have not done so well from these trends and that's part of the reason for backlash.