Society

At Cirque, we never talk about diversity because we live diversity. We have people in our organisation coming from 80 different countries. I like to describe us as citizens of the world.

President and CEO of Cirque du Soleil

I think the people who are larger or those who have more resources like to think they're the ones who have greater power… and they have benefited from that illusion.

Co-Author of "Co-opetition" & Yale School of Management Professor

Ultimately, there are no values in the secular world that can replace the complete happiness people find in the vision of the face of God.

Professor of Government and Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin

We are living longer and measuring GDP growth is not the way to decide whether a society or an economy are flourishing.

How many years or months do we have to be surprised before we realise it's not a surprise that this is a regular pattern? We will have massive waves of forced displacement.

Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right. We're confident that if we have children, they will live long lives as well and we've never had those trends before in all human history.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.

The future is baked into the population of today, and that makes it very convenient for looking at the next couple of decades as our future soldiers are today in nursery school, and our future retirees are entering college.

If you whisk these individuals an additional 200 hundred years forward to present day Jerusalem, these individuals would be entirely shocked. Past knowledge will be largely obsolete. New technologies would appear as witchcraft. Occupations would require incomprehensible skills, and life expectancy would instantaneously double.

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

Conditional on the emergence of the human brain, civilisation was inevitable for many reasons. We had a commendable population in Africa 300,000 years ago and given the fact that these individuals were equipped with the power of the modern brain, the emergence of civilisation was inevitable.

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

World income per capita has increased 14-fold in the past 200 years, whereas over 300,000 years of human existence, it hardly changed. I describe it as the mystery of growth, namely what generated this dramatic transformation in the standard of living over the past 200 years after literally 300,000 years of stagnation?

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual.

Society must demand that you comport yourself within a framework of rules. Once those rules break, society breaks down.

Creator and star of TV show "Judge Judy" for 25 years

We're pro-tech, but we need technology that works for us and intersects with our interests. Today, we have technology which is specifically designed to hack and invade our attention – and it doesn't need to be that way.

Journalist and author known for books on addiction and depression

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.

Journalist and author known for books on addiction and depression

Your attention hasn't collapsed, it's been stolen from you by big forces. Once we understand those forces, we can begin to build meaningful solutions.

Journalist and author known for books on addiction and depression