“Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of hiring a table of yes-men. This is great for ego, bad for business. You need to hire people who are smarter or more experienced than you in those specific roles. They may often challenge you and re-structure your thoughts, but this is important for good governance.”
— Unknown

The quote archive

Philosophy

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

The reality is we live in a very dynamic world that's full of risks and all we should really care about are risk drivers – both financial and non-financial. Alternatives may provide us with ways of hedging out or managing future risks better.

— Dr. Bob Swarup

The role of the architect is not just to create beautiful buildings, but to improve the quality of human life through the built environment.

— Richard Rogers

Renowned British Architect & Designer of Iconic Modern Buildings

To me it was an adventure. I'm a hardened explorer and adventurer, and I remember the whole mission as an adventure with some awesome experiences and beautiful sights.

— Charlie Duke

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

From 20,000 miles away however, you couldn't see any civilisation- just the land mass and those three colours… the brown of the land, the white of the clouds and the ice, and the crystal blue of the ocean. Earth was just suspended in the blackness of space and it was an incredibly beautiful sight.

— Charlie Duke

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

Everything you do in life that's worthwhile entails some risk, that's the nature of exploration and the nature of adventure.

— Charlie Duke

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

Clothing concerns all of the human person, all of the body, all of the relationships of man to body as well as the relationships of the body to society.

— Roland Barthes

French literary theorist & semiotician; pioneer of structuralism & cultural criticism

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

— Joanne Entwistle

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.

— Kurt W. Back

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'.

— Lars Svendsen

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.

— Andrew Lo

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

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

— Jonathan Saxton

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.

— Noam Chomsky

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.

— Jeff D. Sachs

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?

— Alan S. Blinder

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.

— Jill Tarter

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.

— Jill Tarter

Pioneering astronomer & SETI Institute director searching for extraterrestrial intelligence