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.

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.

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.

I sound like a church nut, but look at the role of the churches in the civil rights movement in the States. People are brought together in other ways that can become drivers of change.

The more man learns, the less he knows.

Becoming an empathetic listener helps you to better understand how another person feels and why they communicate as they do.

His smile banished my loneliness and limbed the hollows of my anema with starlight, pure and bright...his touch hummed in my bones like an aria -- a song to my dance, a beginning of a promise.

the important thing is not what we (look) like,but the role we play in our best friend's life.

The one weapon every man, soldier, sailor, or airman should be able to use effectively is the rifle.

I am proud to tell Hollywood that I am a Christian. For the first time I am now free to be myself.

There are some sick people in this world.

Allowing the computer to do one thing is only boring if you don't use the time that the computer saves you to do something else.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.