It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

Our strategy is very horizontal. We're trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically, we're trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social, whether it's on the web or mobile or other devices. So inherently, our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one.

Separate inherently is not equal. There's a reason why $45 million was spent against marriage equality. It's because people understand the word does have meaning. And equality comes when we accept the same notions and the same institutions for everyone, regardless of race and gender and regardless of sex orientation.

I optimize for brands and people I enjoy spending time with - we've invested in Warby Parker, Glossier, Outdoor Voices, Bonobos - because if you're having a good time, you're inherently going to be better at what you're doing. Even the bad times are tolerable when you're working alongside people you respect and like.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain's wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.

I feel angry that I have been born into a society where, by no choice of my own, by no agreement, by no actual decision, I am inherently complicit in the destruction of the world. It is hard to do the right thing. You have to be militant. You have to be an activist. You have to be branded as green to do the right thing.

I listen to a lot of Chicago blues, I suppose. It reminds me of growing up, I guess. But I'm also obsessed by close-harmony groups. Actually, I'm fascinated particularly by brother duos, how they blend together. The Everly Brothers, the Stanley Brothers, The McQuarrys. There's something inherently magical about harmony.

We could not have launched Causes without Facebook Platform, providing real identity and real friends. Facebook Platform was created so that experiences that are inherently social in our off-line lives could be brought online as an authentic expression of who we are; Facebook did this best in revolutionizing photo sharing.

When you say 'I want to be an inspiring leader,' the operative phrase is 'I want.' This is inherently me-centered and self serving whether or not you recognise it. What you are really saying is 'I want to get people to do what I would like them to.' Perhaps they don't want to do that. So you have to somehow get them there.

I have been intimately involved in the techniques of genetic modification as a scientist since GMOs were first conceived. In that time, hundreds of studies and tests have been done on GMO safety - and we've seen no scientific evidence that GMOs are inherently more dangerous than crops produced by traditional plant breeding.

My calculus teacher would send me home every weekend with 400 problems to solve. At the time, I felt it was so strict and demanding, but now I realize that the workload instilled in me a sense of discipline, and showed me that even if I wasn't inherently skilled at something, I could be, with enough dedication and practice.

Why would a lazy guy become a parent of five? Then again, why would creative people who inherently don't like change and criticism become writers, actors, or comedians? There's something about this process. I joke about it: My kids have made me a better person, and I only need, like, 34 more of them to be a really good guy.

Without question, students need to practice, review, and drill skills, but they should do so only in the spirit of working toward more complex mastery of those skills. Redundant drill of skills is inherently boring and insulting to the learner, and it is one of the most effective methods for turning students off to learning.

The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.

Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.

As life forms, viruses are just inherently interesting. It's the microworld - this universe of life too small for us to see - but it's profoundly complicated, and immensely powerful. Ebola is like a beautiful and frightening predator. There is a wonder in the operations of nature that can't be denied, even when we're the losers.

Science has a culture that is inherently cautious and that is normally not a bad thing. You could even say conservative, because of the peer review process and because the scientific method prizes uncertainty and penalises anyone who goes out on any sort of a limb that is not held in place by abundant and well-documented evidence.

Y'know, I think, inherently, when you hear something like a teenage narrative come into play, even the idea that it's being called 'teenage' is a notion that it's being reduced to a problem that's not quite adult. That's a problematic thing to say about a narrative that could actually be dangerous, could be hurtful, could be upsetting.

I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.

Are Labour members inherently bigoted against women, unable to objectively assess political attributes beyond the gender prism? This accusation seems particularly ludicrous when levelled at a party so much in thrall to identity politics that it sometimes feels more like a student union than an organisation set up to defend the working class.

I don't want to believe it - that parenting itself makes art hard, that you must always sacrifice one for the other, that there is something inherently selfish and greedy and darkly obsessive in the desire to care as much about the thing you are writing or making as you do about the other humans in your life. What parent would want to believe this?

For me, university was a bit of a rebellious streak. I love teachers but I'm inherently a bit of an anarchist and don't trust you because you're my teacher. Somewhere around my second or third year, I realized as an artist that it's up to us to choose our path, and there's nothing wrong with being given many different tools to put in your tool bag.

Share This Page