Politics

There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch.

Economist specializing in conflict, development, and poverty research

Every reason why we fight reveals a cost that our society ignored. The grisly, terrible costs of fighting are often 'nil' where, for example in the case of a dictator, the leadership is not held to account.

Economist specializing in conflict, development, and poverty research

The truth is that stable societies are built on the backs of women. Attacking women has a crippling impact on communities.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner & Yazidi Genocide Survivor Advocate

We need to get out of the peacetime footing that we are on and we need to get onto a wartime footing against this climate crisis. During World War II, the US allocated 50% of GDP roughly to fighting, and I believe we need to get to 50% of GDP sustained over 5 to 10 years.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

Markets are good at things that have prices, but certain things cannot have prices. Whenever you have situations where you can't have prices, it's not a question of a missing market, it's that you cannot fundamentally construct this market, and this is when government intervention is required.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

We are now trapping in the Earth's atmospheric oceanic system dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases which is equal to four Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs per second. Imagine if we had alien spaceships hovering above earth, dropping four Hiroshima nuclear bombs into our atmosphere every second. What would we do? We would drop everything until we got rid of them.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate

We are facing the mother of all debt crises. When you look at the data on private and public debt, the debt to GDP ratio was near 200% of global GDP in 1999, today it's more like 350% and rising. In advanced economies, it's over 420% and in China, 330% and rising.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

I don't think it was inevitable until the point where the tanks started rolling-in. It was unstoppable at that point… But 20 years ago, would we have realised this was going to happen? My sense would be absolutely not.

I was working in Russia from 1998-2002... You also had this extraordinary episode where Putin is on record being asked a question, 'President Putin, do you think Russia could ever join NATO?' to which he replied, 'Why not?!' – what he actually said was 'why not…' provided that Russia could be a fully-fledged partner in NATO.

Russia often seemed simply to assume that you get what you want if you're bigger, and more powerful. Russia always seemed to me to have a problem accepting that you have to listen to the voice of smaller countries.

I've sat in front of the chief ideologue in the Moscow Kremlin, and I remember him saying to us in so many words, that 'you cannot govern Russia unless you have a one-party state: Our job in the Kremlin here and now, is not to recreate the communist party, but it's to recreate the one party which will be the natural choice'.

It is very common in politics that each party assume the other party cheated in every election if they lose. It's not that republicans are more suspicious than democrats or vice versa, but their constructive paranoia leads them to believe that the other party is doing something sinister.

Founder of The Skeptics Society & Science Communicator

We believe that flexibility should exist, and that benefits earned should be portable and proportional to the amount of work you're doing on each platform. It's a tremendous opportunity for the global work-system.

There is no such thing as one-sided victory in diplomacy, perhaps in war there is, but not in diplomacy. You are always, or at least should always be, mindful of the other side.

Power is the ability to get things done, to have your way and to make people do things they perhaps didn't want to do – such as pay taxes or go to war.

The clearest thing about being a diplomat is the knowledge that you aren't in control. The problems you're dealing with are huge – with multiple players and facets. Nobody involved in diplomacy can kid themselves that they are in charge, or in control.