Philosophy

Dress is the way in which individuals learn to live in their bodies and feel at home in them.

Fashion is either one of the crowning achievements of western civilization or it is incontrovertible evidence of consumer culture's witless obsession with the trivial and the unreal.

Fashion is one of the most influential phenomena in Western civilisation since the renaissance. It has conquered an increasing number of modern man's fields of activity and has become almost 'second nature'.

Not all financial contracts are created equal. We should not assume that there is one single benchmark for all types of financial transactions. There are certain transactions that should be based on market rates, and others which call for the kind of benchmark that LIBOR provides.

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

You can't stop risks completely, that's the whole point of a free market.

The people in the advanced countries now face a choice: we can express justified horror, or we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes. If we refuse to do the latter, we will be contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.

Renowned Linguist & Political Activist, Critic of US Foreign Policy

Since citizens' militias are anachronistic, gun owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that somehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing Supreme Court has agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast gun-owning American sub-culture. But, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadays are getting massive bloodshed and fear.

Economist & Director of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

One of the themes which is perhaps more important in the intellectual rather than practical world was the excessive love affair that people in the financial world had with the efficient markets hypothesis. If you take that literally, there can't be bubbles. Who can believe that now?

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

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.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

Trying to figure out how we fit into the cosmos is old, it's a basic human question.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb "to believe" we're trying to use the verb "to explore". We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence

Digital currency shows that anything can be money. We have become accustomed to see money as paper or pieces of gold, but in truth it could also be stones, grain, wood, cigarettes or complex computer codes.

There is nothing really so bad about a recession. A recession is very much an economy pausing for breath to re-evaluate where it stands and to assess where to go next.

We always think of every crisis as being somehow different and unique to us. That is human myopia. The reality is that the perennial pattern we see is universal and immemorial.

Money is a cultural abstract. It is the social, cultural and legal consensus of what a given society- at a given time- considers as being money.

Economist & Harvard Professor; Former IMF Chief Economist