All Quotes

"The last time I saw him was in Milo in 2020. I went to visit him at his home and we spent the whole day together. They were intense moments in which words were unnecessary."

"In the 1980s, Franco and I had common interests beyond music. We had both arrived, by different paths, at the teachings of the philosopher and mystic Gurdjieff. In 1981, I was given his book ‘'Meetings with Remarkable Men’', and it took me two years before I opened it: I read it in one sitting. I was finally ready."

"Interviewer: “How much did Battiato influence your career?” Alice: A great deal. Before meeting Franco, I probably would have stopped singing because I had already tried twice and failed to achieve what I wanted."

"My desire was to be an instrument of what Franco conveyed musically and what he communicated. This is fundamental for me: what Franco left us is a precious gift that must be watered, nourished, and kept alive forever, even if there were no need to do so. His records, his films, and his paintings bear witness to his thoughts and his culture. He called himself a “man of music.” He was unique."

"The pandemic exposes weaknesses of current leadership of global public health systems, inequities of resource allocation to Africa, and broken promises by wealthier nations for vaccine equity and resource allocation. This status quo is unacceptable."

"The transformation has been profound, illustrated by advances in the development and roll-out of rapid diagnostics, new drugs, and shorter and safer treatment regimens through capacity building of laboratory and trial sites, and empowerment of a younger generation of African and European investigators."

"The urgent priority now is to get TB control efforts back on target in light of the setbacks incurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic."

"This is the start of a much-needed step-up change in African leadership and increased resources, which will motivate young African researchers to build their careers within Africa and advance front-line research."

"My message is that they have to be very careful not to be swayed by everything that is written in the name of history. They have to be very critical about the books or articles written on Ethiopian history."

"Arriving in the States, I had the feeling of being thrown into an ocean. The ocean was full of knowledge, culture and opportunities, and the choice was clear: I could either learn to swim or sink."

"The culture was foreign, the language was difficult, but my hopes were high."

"God forgive you! What have you done?"

"A man of a spirit most pure and blameless. It was however remarked, half jestingly, that as he had come into the world too early — at seven months — and had pot been reared without difficulty, so there was upon the whole too little of the earthly element in his composition. Of the practices and intrigues of the Curia, he had never been able to comprehend anything."

"All the lands of the West have their eyes directed toward our humility; by them we are considered as a God upon earth."

"We must ensure that we have diversified sources of energy throughout the country, both renewable and non-renewable."

"We must encourage energy use across multiple sectors — not only for household lighting, but also for transport, industry, commerce, and other productive activities — to boost the nation’s economic capacity."

"For many people in Africa who are over 40 years old, they really don’t need science to tell them that climate has changed...because they have seen it, they are living it, they deal with it, and they try the best they can to adapt."

"We need to know a lot more about the world around us in terms of microbes – where they are in the natural environment and what threats they pose to us."

"This is mostly because we have a powerful plant pathology community and that most plant diseases are caused by fungi."

"This award has come to me in the latter part of my career. Maybe that is mostly the case for awards of this type that have huge prestige and likely would not go to early-career scientists."

"What really hurt, is when the world is faced with a threat, a global threat like Omicron, the way you defeat a threat like this, is to stand together, is to work together, to join hands and to deal with threat head on. We should be building bridges, not barriers."

"I see my role as one primarily of mentorship. To pass on my knowledge and experience to younger scientists – to share my passion for the fungi and for research with others that might build on what I have been privileged to do – not only via this award – but linked to my career as a scientist."

"I hope to at least explore those opportunities and to get this process started."

"This, we need to know more about – where are they? What are the long-term threats? Knowing such things prepares us for a more secure future."

"Separation, therefore, is one main business of the mythologist."

"While Kekrops’ Egyptian origin is merely historical sophism, that of Danaos is genuine myth."

"the entire book is opposed to the theory which would make the majority of myths importations from the East."

"In order to assume this just for one [myth] even, distinct proof is required either of so great internal agreement as only to be explained by transplantation or, secondly, that the mythos is absolutely without root in the soil of local tradition, or, lastly, that transplantation is expressed in the legend itself."

"Nearly all this, however, has stayed within the bounds set in the 1820s by the man who destroyed the Ancient Model, Karl Otfried Müller. Müller urged scholars to study Greek mythology in relation to human culture as a whole, but was adamantly opposed to recognizing any specific borrowings from the East. When it comes to higher culture, there has been an even greater reluctance to see any precise parallels."

"Most later historians, and some of his contemporaries, have regarded Müller as essentially Romantic in maintaining a categorical distinction between Greek and other cultures. In Orchomenos he denied the charge and, after apologizing for having treated Greek mythology as if it were all mythology, he claimed that Greece was part of the world, and that therefore Greek mythology had the same basis as that of the rest of mankind. What he objected to was the belief in colonial bonds and the wholesale borrowing of Greek religion and mythology from the East. He was convinced that he had shown these to be unhistorical, though illusions about them had led all previous research astray. In Prolegomena, Müller made an eloquent appeal for scholars to do what he had failed to do, and investigate all mythologies for insights into the Greek one. The ‘anthropological’ school of the Cambridge Classicists James Frazer and Jane Harrison, which flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, in no way overstepped these bounds. What Müller outlawed was any special relationship between Greek and Eastern myth. Indeed, as he put it, ‘the entire book is opposed to the theory which would make the majority of myths importations from the East.’"

"... many Europeans today go to Pelasgians, who are no less distant or savage, and for equally slight gains, to discover African Arkadias. The taste for voyages and adventures is not the monopoly of any one period or any one race, and the extraordinary dispersion of Semites in the contemporary world ... It is true that modern travellers have two motives that the Sidonians do not appear to have possessed, at least to the same degree: scientific curiosity and religious zeal. Furthermore, this comparison between the Pelasgians and the modern Congolese may be surprising. However, one should be on guard against two preconceived ideas, or rather two little-reasoned and almost unconscious feelings: ... our European chauvinism and also what one could call, without too much irreverence, our Greek fanaticism.From Strabo to Ritter, all the geographers have taught us to consider our Europe as a land favoured above all others, unique and superior to all the others in beauty ... in elegance of forms and power of civilization ... This way of looking at the world perhaps can influence a large number of our most habitual thoughts, despite ourselves or almost without our knowledge. We put Europe on one side and Asia or Africa on the other—and between the two, an abyss. When we talk about Asiatic influences on a European country we cannot imagine ... that barbarians could have dared to come to us. Harsh reality forces us to admit that they have sometimes flooded in. Certain people even maintain that the cradle of our first ancestors was far from our Europe, in the centre of Asia. But for our Aryan fathers we have the indulgence of good sons in that even if they came from Asia, they were not Asiatics, they were for all eternity Indo-Europeans. By contrast, an invasion from Semitic Asia to our Aryan Europe is repugnant to all our prejudices. It seems really as if the Phoenician coast was further away from us than the Iranian plateau. It also appears that the Arab invasion throughout the Mediterranean was only a unique fluke, an unfortunate chance ... which one should not for an instant suppose could be repeated. That the Phoenicians occupied Carthage and possessed half Tunisia only concerns Africa. That the Carthaginians in their turn conquered Spain and three-quarters of Sicily is [all right because they are] only, as we say, Africa. But when we find Phoenician traces at Marseilles, Praeneste, Kythera, Salamis Thasos and Samothrace, in Boiotia and in Lakonia at Rhodes and in Crete we do not want, as in Africa, real occupations; we only talk about temporary landings or simple trading posts ... If we go as far as pronouncing the words fortresses or Phoenician possessions we hasten to add that they were only coastal establishments ... This European chauvinism becomes a veritable fanaticism when it is not in Gaul, Etruria, Lucania or Thrace but in Greece that we meet the stranger. At the beginning of this century, all Europe rose up ... the generous Philhellenism of 1820 is no longer fashionable. But one can say that the sentiment has not greatly changed ... We can only conceive of Greece as the country of heroes and gods. Under porticos of white marble ... In vain does Herodotos tell us that everything comes from Phoenicia and Egypt. We know what we should think of dear old Herodotos. After twenty years of Archaeology have provided us, every day and in all the Greek states, with indisputable proofs of Oriental influence, we are still not allowed to treat Greece as an Oriental province like Caria, Lycia or Cyprus because of this. If in our geography we separate Europe from Asia, in our history we separate Greek history from what we call ancient history. We see, nevertheless, from their material and tangible monuments that the Greeks ... were the pupils of Phoenicia and Egypt, and we see that they borrowed from the Semitic Orient right up to their alphabet; yet we recoil with some shock at the sacrilegious hypothesis that their institutions, their customs, their religions, their rituals, their ideas, their literature and all their primitive civilization could also be inherited from the Orient."

"When you get DepEd to endorse this as an ‘educational’ film, the perception is that it will be (at the very least) slightly historical. When you add layers of ‘fiction’ and ‘satire’ then purposefully BLUR those lines with your creative treatment, then you are weaponizing history according to your narrative for sales."

"The Party has accepted that it cannot eliminate Feng Shui; instead, it has placed itself as the ultimate authority on how it should be used. In this “state-led logic of legitimation,” the layout of China’s cities becomes a map of political authority, leading back to Beijing. Reading [Singapore Management University Professor Andrew] Stokols, I recalled the police officers from 2018, claiming atheism while adjusting their desks to face the right way. They weren’t hypocrites. They were simply navigating a country where the state bans superstition yet practices it, where ideology bends to mountains and rivers, and where even the most secular revolution eventually realizes that the dragon veins run deeper than Marx."

"...as AI evolves, the responsibility to regulate and innovate must be handled with extreme care. We don’t know where this technology is taking us"

"In Kenya, we have the highest per capita use of digital financial services in the world,"

"It’s about how am I applying this technology to my everyday life based on the infrastructure that I currently have."

"For every 3,500 people, there’s one doctor... With AI, there is the potential to provide better healthcare services, such as first-line diagnoses through mobile platforms. If I can take a photo of my disease (…) and send it to a bot that uses AI to provide me with a potential diagnosis, even at 80% accuracy, it’s better than no diagnosis at all."

"What we need to do is put measures in place to protect human dignity and human lives, but on the other hand, allow for innovation to go and be built."

"When AI becomes practical, when it’s not just a hype word, that’s when we will truly see the impact of this technology on our continent."

"It’s Africa’s moment to take that leap, seeing AI as a tool to elevate human flourishing in Africa, providing opportunities for development that have long been out of reach."

"Africa showed the world how to use the mobile phone; (…) and we are going to show the world how AI can actually improve people’s lives. Don’t be left behind in this journey."

"Sovereignty means that I need to be in charge of my destiny and able to control my future. This involves understanding the context in which you’re operating and not allowing others to define that context for you."

"The fact that you are not there does not mean the work is not important. The work needs to continue and outlive you."

"It is a very hard truth for Africans to think about is who is going to take over after I have left. You always have to think about that. I don’t want my work to leave with me. I want it to stay and continue impacting"

"Technology was never seen as a way to employ people. The more the President talks about it, the more it changes the mindset of people."

"People who are immunocompromised face greater risks of adverse outcomes from infection with SARS-CoV-2."

"I am happy the way some states have aggressively responded to the coronavirus pandemic."

"The keys necessary to effectively battle this invisible army are testing, tracing, isolation and treatment."

"I am in total agreement with the NMA and the other health professionals. I know that our health professionals are well trained. We have regulatory bodies that regulate their training in addition to National University Commission (NUC) that provides the basic academic inputs for each course. All they need is adequate facilities and motivation to carry out their functions."

"In this pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is mandatory for our health workers and first line responders to protect them from being infected."