Having negotiation skills means that you can weaponize emotional intelligence. If you want people to cooperate with you… if you want to connect with people who you don't share any common-ground with…. If you want to get a deal done without regrets…. That's where negotiation techniques can work, across all cultures.

A film score is not a symphony, or can it be… when you compose for film, you are part of a larger storytelling structure made up of acting, direction, lighting, cinematography and much more. Collaborating on these projects is a puzzle-solving exercise where you- as a composer- are looking for those things that music can do which the other elements cannot.

Power requires oppression. In order to be powerful, you have to stand upon something. Strength comes from within. Strength is replacing power. People are sick of power, especially the young.

My mindset changed from thinking that tomorrow I may be freed, to realising that unless I did something myself, nobody would come and rescue me. One of the ways I gathered strength was by constantly plotting my escape.

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, or as a place of things. It is this distinction between the physical (a place of things) and metaphysical (a forum for action) that typifies the difference, as far as we are aware, between us and other species.

I also worry greatly about how our world is now, with so many people and few resources to sustain them… with countries who are threatening each other with atomic weapons…. Weapons which can never be used because they would destroy the earth.

I didn't have a childhood- I didn't play- every day was about survival. I was always moving to a different-place on a weekly/monthly basis. Since the only food I had was stolen, your presence was soon known by the local shopkeeper and they would make things miserable for you often calling the local police.

I don't label it as a self-care or self-help book; I describe it as a self-destruct book. The reason for this unconventional title stems from the inherent problem with self-care: we are often our own worst caregivers. Left to our own devices, we tend to blow things out of proportion and expect the world to change to make us happy.

As war ravaged Liberia, I realized it is women who bear the greatest burden in prolonged conflicts. We began organizing Christian and Muslim women to demonstrate together, launching protests and a sex strike to help oust Charles Taylor.

Although, today, the universe appears more bio-friendly than it ever was. That doesn't mean it is inhabited. We still have to prove that.

You cannot expend more energy than you can consume. That's a fundamental law of physics. If you do, you starve, you die, and you remove yourself from the gene pool. Biological systems have therefore been under enormous selective pressure to develop highly efficient intelligence.

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.