France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they're valued.

Gastronomy has done more to bring together people of the world than any guns ever could.

However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.

The main purpose of engaging in conversation can no longer be personal advancement or respectability. Instead, I'd like for us to use conversations to create equality, to open ourselves to strangers, and, most practically, to remake our working world.

You cannot measure the minute nuance that makes the difference between being happy and unhappy at work.

It's easy to say, 'I'm anti-capitalist,' or, 'I'm anti-Western decadence,' without having to be challenged about what that actually means, or how you might go about reshaping society to make it better.

What's missing from the world is a sense of direction.

We cannot change public life until we have changed private life.

I don't think fear can be abolished.

I think one of the most important changes of our time has been our attitude to fear. Every civilisation defends itself by keeping fears out and saying 'we protect you from fear'. But it also produces new fears and throughout history people have changed the kind of fears which have worried them.