Philosophy

Seeing the earth from space was just breathtaking – I cannot imagine anywhere being more beautiful, we're living on an absolute paradise. Seeing our planet from that vantage point also changed my perspective on the concept of home. I used to think of myself as a New Yorker, as an America, but now? I'm a citizen of earth first and still all those things. Now, when I think of home, I think of the earth.

Astronaut and educator who conducted spacewalks on the Hubble Space Telescope

I don't know why I didn't just walk-away from Los Alamos...

Theater director and avant-garde performance artist; founder of The Wooster Group

We need to be responsible adults, yet society is- at best- irresponsible adolescents. Our society isn't worried about long-term consequences, it's 'live for today, party now, forget about the hangover...'

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

We are at a stage of development where we have 'god like' physical powers. In the bible, only God could create new life forms- yet with the genetics technologies we have, we can do that. In the Bible, only God was supposed to be able to throw down thunderbolts that could incinerate whole cities; we call them nuclear weapons.

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

Our ethics are not static, they evolve over time and that gives me tremendous hope. If we had remained static, the progress we have made would have been impossible. The evolution of ethics is essential to our survival.

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

There's a great quote that is 'political correctness is tyranny with manners'. With Lululemon, we put authenticity into everything we did, it was about being great. Our vision statement was about elevating the world from a place of mediocrity to greatness.

Founder of Lululemon Athletica, Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist

We should learn how to fight not flight. And fight doesn't have to be a physical thing – it can be that you feel something's going to be uncomfortable 'okay well let's avoid it'. No, go through with it but go through with it in a progressive manner, and go through with it in an intelligent manner and measure your results.

Boxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin

If you want to grow, you need to go through something uncomfortable and come out the other end. If you want to grow, you have to go forward in progressive steps. It should always be a little bit uncomfortable because otherwise there's no growth. And that's the secret. It's like playing chess but while getting punched in the face.

Boxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin

Our psychology is open-ended: we can plug in variables, and are not just tied to constants. We can expand our circle of sympathy – we can employ the logic of impartiality, and the emotional prompts of human contact and vicarious experience, and expand our fellow-feeling from our family to our clan, our nation, tribe, and from there to all of humanity and even other sentient beings.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

Knowledge isn't always used to make people better off, of course. It can be used to make more lethal weaponry and more effective militia and armies – so we must couple knowledge with humanism, with universal sympathy, for it to be a force for good. Without knowledge, however, all the sympathy in the world would be impotent – they must exist together.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

An appreciation of entropy is necessary to grasp that we are not entitled to wellbeing, progress, comfort, or health. The forces of the universe are- at best, indifferent- at worse, antipathetic- to our interests. Left to their own devices, things get worse.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

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.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

Once we take their quantum property into account, space and time changes dramatically. Space is granular, because one of the characteristics of quantum theory is to show that continuous things have often a granular structure, like light, which is a cloud of photons. Similarly, time cannot be anymore understood ad an external independently flowing entity. Time is just he counting of granular happenings in nature.

Theoretical physicist known for loop quantum gravity research and popular science writing

Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered... Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes. Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement.

Theoretical Physicist & Bestselling Author on String Theory & Cosmology

Quantum mechanics is a whole new way of thinking– it says that the world is all by itself as a wave function of the universe, but you can never observe that. You can never observe a wave function directly. There is a complex relationship between what the world is and what you see when you look at it, and that relationship involves the idea that you can never predict precisely what you will see, but you can simply say the probability of what you will see.

Theoretical physicist & podcaster explaining cosmology and philosophy