“There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.”

“We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.”

“All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.”

“The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.”

“We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.”

“The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.”

“The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.”

“I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.”

“I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.”

“I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.”

“Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.”