114 Quotes by Geoff Mulgan

Before the Second World War, L’Oreal in France was an active supporter of the French fascists. The cosmetic group’s founder Eugene Schueller was an active member of the ‘Cagoule’ group, committed to the violent overthrow of the Third Republic, and hosted meetings at Oreal headquarters.

With a fractured sense of self, we come to depend on what people feed back to us – often mediated through social networks – not what we are. We have complex identities but may become less able to act as a subject – confident in what we really are.

There is a yearning for people to return to elementary moral virtues, such as integrity and commitment. We distrust people who have no centering of values. We greatly respect businessmen, for example, if they display those virtues, even if we don’t necessarily agree with the people.

The once-science-fiction notion of hyper-connectivity – where we are all constantly connected to social networks and other bubbling streams of digital data – has rapidly become a widespread reality.

Many of the greatest composers and musicians do their best work in extreme confinement but we are seeing it in other fields – uses of technology to link people together in networks to solve problems and almost certainly we’ll get better ideas than we would from them just doing it on their own.

Computing should be taught as a rigorous – but fun – discipline covering topics like programming, database structures, and algorithms. That doesn’t have to be boring.

Deeper fulfilment is rather different from the happiness of seeing a good film or watching your team win at football, and it doesn’t come at the push of a button.

Even many of the teenagers who feel confident on navigating the web simply don’t have the skills needed to ‘write and create’ digital tools, not simply consume them.

One effect of an individualistic culture that’s poor at instilling mutual respect is that people jump more quickly to anger or violence.