Politics

In these political times, that's more difficult, you must plant your flag somewhere, and someone will get upset. You have to be able to take that in your stride.

We're starting to realise that business is a major force in deciding the sort of society we live in- and so the role of business must be more in tune with political, social and moral norms of the day.

We need a change from managers to leaders. We need people who can understand the political and moral structure of their companies, and who can motivate and bring people to go in the direction of those values. That's true leadership.

There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

Power is relational; we talk about seizing power but ultimately – at least in democratic societies – you need the followers to be powerful, and it's important therefore for us to understand the cognitive biases that mean that we keep gravitating towards people who are clearly unfit for the job.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

Digital media has allowed a complete bypass of those structures – there's less control around power – and people can amass huge followings for totally irrational reasons.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

There's an innate tendency in human-beings to sort ourselves by how much we want power. Some of us don't want it at all, some of us are absolutely obsessed with it. The interaction between the individual and the system is therefore critical.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

How many years or months do we have to be surprised before we realise it's not a surprise that this is a regular pattern? We will have massive waves of forced displacement.

The future is baked into the population of today, and that makes it very convenient for looking at the next couple of decades as our future soldiers are today in nursery school, and our future retirees are entering college.

Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual.

There is a degree of laziness and political correctness which has crept into the justice system. Many judges are appointed not elected. They don't want to offend. Instead of making a decision, they 'cut the baby in half' and everyone is left being a little bit miserable.

Creator and star of TV show "Judge Judy" for 25 years

I don't think it's a coincidence that globally, we're having the biggest crisis of democracy since the 1930s. At the same time as we're finding it hard to focus and pay attention, we also can't listen to each other.

Journalist and author known for books on addiction and depression

You can't force people to change- you have to find their passion and implement based on that. The economist, Dambisa Moyo, showed that even though $2.5trillion has been invested in aid, Africa is now net-poorer than 50 years ago.

With leadership and privilege comes immense responsibility. And in this case, it basically took 20 years for the US to replace the Taliban, with the Taliban. This is a backward step of epic proportions for women's rights.

As a collective, we tend to look at progress as being linear, especially where it concerns women's rights. This is a huge mistake and breeds complacency because we risk losing the hard-won gains.

Women in Iran are quite possibly the greatest threat to the regime, they are courageous and relentless in their pursuit of justice, human rights, and freedom from oppression and make the sacrifices needed to bring about change for future generations.