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No one’s going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.
Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.
In motivating people, you’ve got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved.
So long as I can stay mentally alert – inquiring, curious – I want to keep going. I love my wife and my children, but I don’t want to sit around at home with them. We go on safaris and things like that. I can do that for a couple of weeks a year. I’m just not ready to stop, to die.
Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.
I’m not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government, but not to the point of being a libertarian.
The UK desperately needs less government and freer markets.
I’m a strange mixture of my mother’s curiosity my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility and my mother’s father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.
I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.
When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies – and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.