Philosophy

we make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same…

Author of "The Teachings of Don Juan" & Controversial Anthropologist

People underestimate their personal probability of encountering negative …it is not so much that individuals believe that negative events will not happen, but rather that these events are relatively unlikely to happen to them.

Former Premier of New Brunswick & Canadian diplomat and businessman

I genuinely believe that you can train yourself to see trouble as opportunity and realise that the best time to make money is when other people are most fearful.

Value investor and niece of legendary investor John Templeton

…the question is not can they reason? Or can they talk? …But can they suffer?

Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

To me the question is, why are we denying them the obvious rights they should have? They are flesh and blood, they feel pain as we do, they experience joy, they have their own behaviours and their own languages among themselves that they understand and we don't. They have maternal instincts and look after each other as we do… it's not an intellectual thing when a mother protects her child; it's an instinctive behaviour.

Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

Architecture should fulfil multiple criteria. One of its purposes is to itself. A lot of people believe to some degree, in the autonomy of architecture as a discipline which means that part of the purpose of architecture is to construct new forms of knowledge that relate to the enhancement and advancement of the discipline.

Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design & Architecture Theorist

That's a very simple yet complicated question. Architecture exists to create the physical environment in which people live. Obviously that's a very simple answer, but if we deep digger we see the complexities. What is the built environment? what constitutes quality of life? how do architects determine whether something is positive, helpful or relevant for individuals and collectives?

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.

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.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

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

The question as to whether we are alone has been asked by humans almost since they first crawled out of the cave! For millennia we used to ask the priests, philosophers or shaman- whoever we thought was wise- how to answer that question. They always came back with a belief system. 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

I use the word repugnance to describe transactions that some people would like to engage in, that other people would not like them to; it's often hard to pin-down what harm the transaction does to anyone else.

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

Markets are human artefacts; however we often treat them as natural phenomenon in the same way we might treat a language. People are the ones who ultimately make language, but we feel have no control over it as it's such an emergent phenomenon. Markets are emergent phenomenon too, but individual market-places have proprietors and groups of users and therefore markets are more amenable to change. When something isn't working, we can change the rules!

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

From the guys who started Adobe to Steve Jobs, and everyone in between…. for the people I documented, money was secondary… They knew absolutely they would make money, but changing the world and doing cool stuff was the primary goal; that was their mission.

Businesses, or rather their leadership, is often saddled with a set of problems and daily issues that prevents them from taking an objective view of their realities…forget the trees, often there is too much leaf watching to notice they are in a forest.

BMW Chief Designer; Revolutionized Automotive Design Language in 2000s

What is the value of asking the right question to prompt the right answer? Since it is not a narrow discipline and one with great roots in cultivating subjective experiences the integration and contribution of design is often overlooked in a silo mentality.

BMW Chief Designer; Revolutionized Automotive Design Language in 2000s