From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The very idea that – say – Make America Great Again – should be our guiding creed captures almost all the counter-enlightenment themes. It idealises the greatness of a nation as the ultimate good, as opposed to making all people healthier, safer, happier, richer and better educated. Rather than looking ahead to the progress that can be made, it looks back to a hypothetical golden-age to which we must return.
Quantum mechanics is a consistent mathematical structure, not that difficult to understand in itself, which nature has chosen. The confusing thing is that nature chose something that doesn't feel intuitive to us. It has a reputation for being mystifying mainly because of its history rather than what it really is as a theory.
The truth is, any book about pets is really a book about humans. It's not about the pets themselves. I'm always amused when friends send me pictures of their dog or cat, because I'm tempted to write back and say, 'If you're not in the picture, it's a misrepresentation of what's going on.'
I wish I had known that Football is the most important part of the least important parts of my life. A bad result or losing in a final of the champions League is hard to take, but there are worse things to endure in life.
If you don't love the act of doing, you'll never find happiness. If your motivation is glory or money, you're bound to be disappointed. If you're more excited about lunch with investment bankers or the Harvard Club than dealing with the day-to-day realities—like working with bakers or being deeply involved in the entity—you'll end up unhappy.
You don't pick an aesthetic in abstract – you need to have a core point, a core reason to make a film, and the form of aesthetic springs from that necessity. Everything has to relate to that core intention.
We've lost our relationship with ourselves; and that is all-encompassing because without a relationship with ourselves, we can't then have a relationship with nature, with each other and the planet.
The phrase 'I don't know' serves as both an invitation and a challenge, a beckoning call to delve into the unknown and piece together the enigmatic puzzle of knowledge. Science, at its core, thrives not on regurgitating established facts but on the exhilaration of unearthing new discoveries.
Art is a vocation for me, not a career, not a job… you wouldn't say to a nun. 'so, how did you get into God?'
We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.
Our inner desire to start something new and make it big has been one of the most catalysing factors behind our collective evolution as a species. Our quest to explore and develop markets has persisted since the time humans have been trading goods.
There's only so much our world will become richer by surrounding ourselves with clones of ourselves!