Quotes

In the battle for Kobane on the Syrian border, everyone talks about the enemy - IS - and the frightening ideas that drive them. No one talks about the Kurdish defenders and what inspires them.

BP is accused of destroying the wildlife and coastline of America, but if you look back into history, you find that BP did something even worse to America. They gave the world Ayatollah Khomeini.

James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and '60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.

In the early 1970s in Washington, a small group of young conservative activists came together to try and change American politics. They called themselves the New Right, and they were convinced that unless they did something drastic, the liberals and the left-wingers in America were going to take over the country.

Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process, Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated.

I have always been fascinated by the way music can completely change the way you watch film - and how you feel as you watch the images.

I have always been fascinated by the story of Henrietta Lacks.

In many cruise ships, there are hundreds of workers from some of the poorest countries on earth who are paid minute amounts of actual wages - sometimes less than two dollars a day - to attend to the passengers' needs.

Together, the western elites and Gaddafi helped to lead us into a simplistic two-dimensional vision of the world - full of exaggerations and falsehoods. A fake bubble of certainty that has imprisoned us in the West - and is now preventing us from understanding what is really going on in the world outside.

So much of the language that surrounds us - from things like economics, management theory, and the algorithms built into computer systems - appears to be objective and neutral. But in fact, it is loaded with powerful, and very debatable, political assumptions about how society should work and what human beings are really like.

The problem with wonks is that they can't deal with emotion and feeling, and they don't like stories. It means that they cannot connect at all with the feelings and imaginations of the voters.

When you bring God into politics, very strange things happen.

At its heart, 'South Park' has a touching faith in human beings: that despite their absurdities and flaws, people have the capacity to create a better world.

Fred Hoyle was one of the first scientists to become famous on television and radio. It was because he told a dramatic story about the universe - about how amazing it is and the extraordinary discoveries that astronomers like him were making.

Tyler Kent himself is weird and mesmerising - but still unrepentantly anti-Semitic.

Journalists, whose job is to pull back and tell dramatic stories that bring power into focus, find it impossible because things like economic theory are both incomprehensible and, above all, boring. The same is true of 'management science.'

Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks.

I really like knowledge and reading books and just generally immersing myself in information.

In 2007 I was at Facebook, and we looked at some of the social networks in Asia, and they were full of games.

More than a billion people use the Internet, yet only a tiny fraction contribute their knowledge to it.

We started off by inviting our friends to use Quora, and then they invited their friends, and it just grew from there.

I've really enjoyed starting Quora from the beginning. It's really nice to have a new start to things.

Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it. And at the same time, give people a platform that is easy to use for sharing the knowledge.

The more questions and answers we get, the more useful Quora is.

I think as more people use the phones to access the Internet, they have a lot less patience for trying to find things on the search engines. That is because you need to figure a lot of things out for search to work.