You start by asking yourself certain questions: who am I? what is it that wants to know who I am? What do I want for myself and the world? What is my purpose? What gives me meaning and purpose in life?

If you fail many times in life, it can be frustrating, but, if you look differently at that, you can see that if you fail many times, you get up many times. If you didn't get up after the first fall, you could never have fought. Failure just means you got knocked down.

And a country that stops its citizens having access to Facebook, say, or Google or Skype, faces real disadvantages – from inward investment to domestic discontent…

The greatest threat to our markets comes not from our adversaries but from ourselves. I think Ben Bernanke's policies are a greater threat to US national security than anything being cooked up in Moscow.

The reason for having leadership is to be found in the social nature of man. As an individual being man has the ability to act and to direct his own behaviour. But man lives in a society with a complex structure in which the actions of many individuals within groups in a variety of situations have to be directed.

We have made money, capital, materialism and consumption into our God, it's a disease – you could call it affluenza. It is perhaps because of this context that humanity has lost its way, and the consideration of human rights has been subordinated to the interests of a handful of powerful people who sit at the top of the pyramid.

There's something intrinsically sensual about jewellery, you wear it on your skin, it's a part of you and it embodies and imbues the personality and lustre of the wearer. There's something about gold and stones in particular which- for me- have a magical element.

That's what entrepreneurship is all about–experimenting and finding a way of achieving some goal in the context of business. It's something I've always found fascinating.

The world is changing now faster than you and I change our socks! It's constantly changing, and that constantly changing world is going to induce more movie-making. If you go on YouTube, you can see the most talented young people all over the world who take a camera and start to film ideas they have and put them online.

A revealing statistic is that 80% of ten-year-olds in these countries struggle with basic comprehension, even though they can technically read individual words. This lack of understanding severely hinders their future productivity.

I used to be skeptical about whether I could live an additional 5 years. Now, I'm convinced that I could live 20 years beyond what I would have done. Drugs on our near horizon will give us easily another 20 years, and the drugs not far behind that, another 100. I've never been more excited about the prospect of human health than I am right now.

Monkeys are superior to men in this: When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.