From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The role of the dollar rests on many other things, not just economics. There is a reason why the likes of Alfred Smith, and Karl Marx studied politics and not economics.
When you're trying to understand the motivations of people, quite often understanding the emotional drivers is at least as important as understanding the facts that took them there. In the case of Putin and the people around him, it's resentment and it's anger and it's determination to recover something they believe they lost.
Forgetfulness of the past and the consequences such forgetfulness potentially produces. Extreme nationalism prevents nations from cooperating with other nations.
The danger is that when we jump too quickly to the solution, not only is the floor littered with the inventions that never worked, but we risk designing solutions that never fit the problem.
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.
I feel as if our world is moving away from the ideals we subscribed to, and I wanted to reflect that through music. I wanted to create something hopeful and uplifting from this dark material of our times as a metaphor for the questions we are facing as a society.
Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.
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.
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.
At the risk of being glib, in the United States, most of the narcissistic sociopaths are also devoutly religious...
There is an honest trade-off between labour market protection and learning. If you have an extremely static labour market—like the high protection laws in France or Spain—you get stability, but you sacrifice learning. You pay a 'learning cost' for that 'stability dividend.'
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.