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.

Throughout the western world, new systems have risen up whose job is to constantly record and monitor the present - and then compare that to the recorded past. The aim is to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that, find ways of stopping change. Keeping things the same.

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.

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.

I don't want to make people cry - unless it's with happiness.

In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

I think some parents think, 'Oh, having kids is so beautiful; I want others to feel the joy I do.'