Society

Most people we have worked with who have accomplished great things have an other-centred purpose, and that's never just 'make a lot of money…' – it could be to make women's lives easier, to close the inequality gap, to change the world, it's something which isn't strictly personal and selfish.

Psychologist & Author of "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Our disconnection from nature has led to such irreverence towards the earth, a kind of murderous environmental rampage, a collective matricide. We destroy the forests, we pollute the waters, we violate the earth to the point where environmental damage now threatens the long-term survival of our species.

Author of "A Return to Love" & Spiritual Activist

The zeitgeist of this moment is not about charismatic leaders but about an awakened citizenry. This isn't an era of soloists. It's an era of change led by the choir, where everyone is learning to sing their own note by living as authentically as we can.

Author of "A Return to Love" & Spiritual Activist

You cannot genuinely connect with another human being through technology. You can only connect with other human beings through the mind, and through love, but technology can serve the process.

Author of "A Return to Love" & Spiritual Activist

Western civilisation has veered off course; we have de-sacralised the world in which we live. We are collectively insane, and we need to mount our own intervention.

Author of "A Return to Love" & Spiritual Activist

Society feels broken because society is broken. When the most powerful nations in the world are spending billions of dollars on ways to kill each-other, and a fraction of those resources on ways to heal each other, we're broken.

Author of "A Return to Love" & Spiritual Activist

Our world is the projection of our collective insanity, and run by world-leaders who are professional thugs, gangsters and mobsters.

Wellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality

It was visionaries with a quest for achievement who made Apollo happen, and it seems to me that now? Our sense and spirit of adventure boils down to what we can afford, and not what we can learn or achieve by doing something.

Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11; Second Person to Walk on Moon

I don't think there is anything about putting your country first that requires you to turn your back on the rest of the world. If anything, the opposite is true.

Co-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate

We can't solve problems if we don't understand them.

Co-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate

We like to think of data as being objective, but the answers we get are often shaped by the questions we ask. When those questions are biased, the data is, too.

Co-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate

If technology is just for the privileged few, then it will concentrate power in the hands of those who already have it.

Co-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate

We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles, sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year. At the same time, we have pizzagate, QAnon, chemtrails and 9/11 truthers.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

Truth is an aspiration which none of us can ever know that we have attained. Nobody has a pipeline to the truth; nobody is imbued with divine revelation. We seek truth through institutions like science, journalism, governance, justice systems and record keeping. These are the bodies that make us collectively more suited to attain the truth.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

There's no question that Facebook could have done much, much more in the last few years to address the problem. I don't think we can inoculate people against crazy ideas, they will always have takers- but we can certainly improve the way that platforms like Facebook operate because they don't have any incentive at the moment to restrict the spread of harmful content.

British historian and author specializing in financial and military history

The story of modernity is a story of scientific advance – but in reality, with every step forward, we're taking half a step backward in terms of making ourselves more fragile.

British historian and author specializing in financial and military history