The question, "When did you last listen to a poor person properly and try to understand what's going on inside their own experience?" enables you to connect.

People think there's a single solution to complex problems, and the solution is often making an enemy of a group of people - pulling back and rejecting the other.

I keep coming back to the phrase "Dance with the system" - not just march onwards no matter what happens.

Floundering around, learning by doing but also by failing, is not only good but inevitable.

If you were disabled in Russia, you had to re-register every year, and it took up to six months to re-register, so people who lost limbs in Afghanistan had to prove that their leg hadn't grown back.

Somewhere like Russia or China, decision-makers have far fewer constraints on acting than in more open systems.

There are always pressures on decision-makers other than just what is right or what is wrong.

Lots of people in the open system are very determined to try and strengthen evidence-based policy.

To be effective at selling ideas, at being a lobbyist, influencing other people, you have to be very sure of yourself.

I see [activists] getting really angry that people won't just do what the evidence tells them, and that's not very helpful. You need to actually think why that is.

There's no point in just hankering for the big trade unions of the 1950s or '60s.

If one has never known freedom, it is easy to be blind to the gridirons composing one's cell.

Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.

Nature does not proceed by leaps.

In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.

My first occupation was to map the country.

The lesson is that voters in both parties are in a very anti-establishment, populist mood. Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate.

The beauty for Trump is that [Paul] Ryan et. al have worked on all this legislation and he is going to be able to hit the ground running.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.