All Quotes

"Yes, I could have had a better house and gone jogging on the beach or gone to a spa every weekend, But is that what life is all about? Could I have stayed there knowing my sisters were being cut and abducted and turned into servants?"

"In the long run, stronger women create stronger communities, stronger women create a stronger nation, and stronger women create a stronger Africa."

"Daddy, you lived your time. This is our period, our children’s period. We don’t want to kill our children. I hope you are wise enough to accept that."

"Stop it!, the drug should be used not more than twice a year and only in emergency situations."

"To me it's just not understanding the way the world works and not understanding economics. It's not really rocket science. And maybe that's why for people who are always looking for complexity, they fail to see that. I think for folks like him, there's something very unsettling about this idea that the market can take care of things."

"Jeffrey Sachs thought he could fix poverty and so forth, but then what he did is basically set up a village, what they would call the millennium development villages. And there they just went on to basically do a very top down type of approach to economics. Eventually what happened is they went nowhere and things started rotting all over the place. All of this stuff that they spent millions of dollars on. And by the way, an entrepreneur would've probably produced the same, better quality, cheaper, and still be able to sell it, but they had nothing to show for it. That's the mentality of people like that."

"Life is made of tradeoffs. But when it comes to foreign aid, I think people only look at supposedly the little wins in the tradeoffs. I had this woman, she was very upset with me. For her, she's sure the roads can only be helpful. Aren't they? You see road equals benefit."

"Let me talk about the costs. Because of this road, I have a culture of dependency that keeps on being ingrained in my people. That surely cannot be good for the entrepreneurial mindset that we need from them in order to really create wealth and value. A cultural dependency just doesn't go hand in hand with economic progress."

"This road came because of foreign aid. Foreign aid came to us because supposedly we're poor. Our governments are literally poor. They don't have enough money to cater to all the needs of what the government would need money for."

"Now, I would like to tell people, why do you think we are in that situation? Why do you think that we're poor in the first place so much that we need you to inject the additional cash so that we can build the roads that normally we should have built for ourselves with the money that we made? We are poor because we don't let our entrepreneurs work. If you just come and finance for me what I should have financed for myself and by myself and we keep doing this, nothing has changed since the end of so-called colonialism."

"So for that road, I get a generation of young people behaving this way, which cannot operate in the market. For that road I also got more violence and more violence as well as leaders who never want to leave."

"Being in Silicon Valley, I see first-hand how the power of technology, innovation, ingenuity and entrepreneurship can create “magic” that can really make a big impact in people’s lives and literally change the world. I would like to encourage the Silicon Valley community to think of how they can help spread that “magic” to the developing world, to increase the cross-collaborations with entrepreneurs from the developing world so they too can leverage the power of innovation and ingenuity to improve the living conditions of all people around the world."

"The potential of stem cells in the treatment of various diseases, especially those of the brain, is amazing."

"That afternoon I asked my first patient...to hold one hand over his right eye and the other over all but the outside half of his left eye. I was completely surprised when he became a bit agitated and said, 'Oh, my God!'. [Schiffer:] 'What's that?' I had no idea what he meant. [The patient said:] 'I have all my anxiety back.' Some months earlier, ...[he] had entered treatment for profound anxiety stemming from childhood mistreatment. By this time, his symptoms had been substantially relieved. 'Try the other side [right side of the right eye],' I retorted.'That's better!' he immediately responded, to the relief of both of us. I asked him to go back and forth, and he repeatedly felt his symptoms when he looked to the left side of his left eye, and he had the complete relief of his symptoms when he looked out of the right half of his right eye. We were both amazed."

"Dual-brain therapy entails a reaching out to the mind of the troubled hemisphere, attempting through patience, persistence, and a loving, mature, and informed attitude to teach it that it no longer has to fear abuse or protect itself with the archaic defenses that have become the source of new pain and problems."

"Depression, like anxiety, is the natural biological consequence of experience. Anxiety comes from a sense of threat. Depression comes from a sense of defeat."

"The mind in ...[her] right hemisphere acted much like her father in its condemnation of herself. Because it is on the inside, the troubled mind can attack with a ferocity rare in the external world. This is why many of my depressed patients say to me,'If you've never been depressed, you have no idea how terrible it is.'"

"The troubled mind is "crazy" only if we expect to encounter the mind of a mature adult."

"I don't believe that a psychotic disorder is entirely different from an anxiety disorder, a depressive disorder, or a posttraumatic stress disorder. In all cases, psychological problems stem from traumas that lead first to a sense of anxiety and then to defeat."

"Imagine you and I are in a room with a third person. When I direct my conversation to you and you engage in the conversation with me, we may lose sight of the fact that for a few moments, we are ignoring the third person. But this third person still exists and observes and thinks even when he is not actively engaged in in the conversation. This is my vision of how they two minds generally work. When one side is stimulated, the other still exists and functions.... The two hemispheres [of the brain] relate to each other as two people do. Both listen, talk, and consider. Both have feelings and attitudes towards the other."

"By stimulating one brain hemisphere at a time, I can talk with the two personalities within one person, and this greatly facilitates the aims of Dual-Brain Psychology."

"Freud emphasized an internal, mentally primitive structure, whereas I saw an immature, conscious person."

"I see psychiatric diagnoses as descriptions of psychological states that all ultimately come out of the person's experience of traumas and their responses to them.... [Regarding psychiatric patients] I feel that dual-brain psychology treats the person through an understanding of his or her psychology. And that, in my experience, always relates to his or her covert traumas, traumas that (for reasons not yet understood) usually relate to one cerebral hemisphere, either the left brain or the right brain."

"Africa could be the best place on earth, but instead our best and brightest minds are leaving the continent in the millions."

"The biggest things I learned were that there is so much work to be done in Africa and that Africans must help themselves. We can no longer afford to rely on rich countries to provide us with foreign aid. It’s the person who the shoe pinches who knows how it needs to be adjusted."

"As Chief Scientific Officer, my vision is to champion science and innovation that not only push the boundaries of human knowledge but also catalyse positive change in society. This will enable Africa to harness the power of science to tackle our most pressing challenges and build a healthier, productive and more sustainable future for generations to come. I am looking forward to leading the programmes unit and contributing to the Foundation’s plan to strengthen, support and promote Africa’s science and innovations ecosystem."

"The most exciting thing about joining APHRC is the opportunity to work directly with researchers to develop a capacity building strategy that emphasizes the importance of research leadership both in, and for, Africa"

"Africa carries over 25% of the global disease burden but hosts only about 4% of clinical trials. Why is that acceptable? This session is a call to shift that paradigm to lead with local networks, fund our priorities, and own our data. Join us to shape a new future where African science drives African solutions."

"African governments have to change how they think. Travel grants are great, but $10 to $20,000 is not going to fund research at the cutting-edge level."

"I'm a benefactor of a father who broke away from the mould to be sure my sister and I got equitable education,"

"It was not exactly as you say. In practice, the 12 of us never lived at home at the same time, because the family grew up with 22 years between the eldest to the youngest (the last one was born in 1968). My elder sisters left early, and I am the tenth. In my first memories, there were only five or six siblings at home. The worst was not to have a room of my own. The house was big, but the rooms were not many, however large."

"It is about the glory of life which always wins. But how many difficult moments we could have escaped if someone told us how to live in a different society or how to respect people from a different world."

"The problem is not in the language, a new language is the smallest challenge of all; it’s about misunderstanding and absence of willingness to accept somebody or something different."

"The message of this book is to the people who live in the so called equal society but who are not aware that their world is not equal for everybody. It might help them to open their eyes and see that life in the secure world of theirs isn’t always fair."

"I loved mathematics and wanted to go as far as I could."

"They did not accept that I was here, studying with them."

"A poll will give you the most popular answer but not the answer that optimizes the preference of a group."

"You have the sense of touch because you need it."

"We take the sense of touch for granted. Think about it: Without it, you're missing one of the basic senses that enables you to interact with the world."

"The reason that fish form schools, birds form flocks, and bees form swarms is that they are smarter together than they would be apart. They don't take a vote; they don't take a poll: they form a system. They are all interactive and make a decision together in real time."

"How does nature amplify the intelligence of groups? It forms swarms."

"Forcing polarized groups into a swarm allows them to find the answer that most people are satisfied with"

"Beyond individual intelligence, nature has also cultivated intelligence through swarms. For example, bees, birds and fish act in a more intelligent way when acting together as a swarm, flock or school"

"Taking a vote or poll is a great simple way to take a decision, but it doesn't help a group find consensus. It actually polarizes people and highlights the differences between them. People end up getting entrenched in their views."

"We focus on a unique form of artificial intelligence called artificial swarm intelligence"

"I love what I do and I’m a workaholic, so for sure men who don’t like alpha women will not be very attracted to this side of my personality. I don’t think I will ever be a housewife type of girl, I feel that I will want to work, achieve and create value for others even when I’m 80 years old. Not everyone likes that, and it’s totally fine with me"

"Someone who wants to grow with me, that doesn’t just live but wants to learn and progress in every area of his life. A life lover. Someone honest and most importantly someone with a big heart and a pure soul."

"But isn’t that life too? I’m an incredible life lover, that’s why I do and create so much. I love every single bit of my job…and this is just the beginning. Wait and see."

"The reasoning since my young age. At the High School, I was seduced by Analysis, and trigonometry I was fan of argumentations and proofs. This leads my choice of analysis at the university."

"No, once my choice was done, I was able to go on myself."