Africa should not again face isolation or stigmatisation based on ignorance and unrepresentative imagery.

The way forward for Africa is investment.

I come from a typical family.

I'm an engineer. I'm a techie, really.

For citizens to become fully engaged in holding their leadership to account, accurate information is required to see where action is needed, to measure the results of policies and programmes, to build support for courageous decisions and to consolidate political legitimacy.

Almost every country in Africa has now instituted multi-party democracy.

Young people are better educated. They grew up in a society which is well connected, well informed. They are able to communicate to one another, to know what is happening.

Positive market incentives operating in the public interest are too few and far between, and are also up against a seemingly never-ending expansion of perverse incentives and lobbying.

Africa offers the highest return on investment in the world.

Tony Blair is paid $500,000 for one speech, and no one asks how he is going to spend it.

The issue with international institutions is that there is a crisis of legitimacy. Trust in these institutions is a serious problem.

Look at the international bodies that came out of U.N. - international, publicly funded bodies that neither you or I know their names, because they are completely outdated and still publicly funded because there are no sunset clauses.

From my father, I learnt kindness and how to talk straight.

People never confess to failure. They should.

The fight against Ebola cannot undermine the fight against poverty.

Far from being hopeless, Africa is full of hope and potential, maybe more so than any other continent. The challenge is to ensure that its potential is utilised.

I don't even have a small boat. I don't even have a toy boat in my bathtub. I don't have a biplane, I don't have anything. Those things are toys, and I don't need them to be happy.

I really don't have heroes in business; I never looked up at business people.

In the final analysis, finding a way to do clean business and not to pay bribes actually improves your bottom line.

African leaders work really under severe limitations and constraints.

We need to keep pressure on our own governments to force more and more transparency.

If economic progress is not translated into better quality of life and respect for citizens' rights, we will witness more Tahrir Squares in Africa.

Africa's success stories are delivering the whole range of the public goods and services that citizens have a right to expect and are forging a path that we hope more will follow.

Africa is underpopulated. We have 20% of the world's landmass and 13% of its population.

The Security Council represents the situation from 1945 - you had the Allies who won the war who occupied that. The defeated guys - the Germans and Japan - were out. The occupied countries had no voice. That was fine in '45, but today, Germany rules Europe, frankly. They are driving Europe but have no voice.

It's time Africa started listening to our young people instead of always telling them what to do.

Remarkably, governments are beginning to embrace the idea that nothing enhances democracy more than giving voice and information to everybody in the country. Why not open their books if they have nothing to hide?

Mexico established a unique three-part governing system shared by the government, the information commission and civil society organisations.

Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach.

The term 'renaissance man' is always bandied about. I don't think that applies to me. You think about Leonardo da Vinci, and he was a painter and a physicist and an architect, and that is a true renaissance man.

It's heartbreaking that so many hundreds of millions of people around the world are desperate for the right to vote, but here in America people stay home on election day.

A great song is a great song, whether it's on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.

I may be a lifelong 'downtowner,' but Central Park really is the most amazing and the most beautiful part of New York City.

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

There might be a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats on key social issues like women's rights and health care. But when it comes to taking corporate cash, they're pretty much the same beast.

Mainly I'm a vegan because I like animals, and I don't want to be involved in their suffering. Also, it's better for my health and for the environment.

Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn.

What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

The progressive movement needs more crazy and amoral/immoral right-wing politicians and pundits like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they've figured things out, no patience for people who think they're right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.

When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound - Joy Division's 'Closer,' or Echo and the Bunnymen's 'Heaven Up Here'... I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.

Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.

If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.

I like tea and yoga, but I don't do yoga.

I've had insomnia since I was a little kid and I never sleep well. Sometimes I sleep very badly and sometimes I sleep slightly badly. I get it especially when I'm on tour because you cross a lot of time zones, and I'm not very adaptable.

I think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.

I like noise. It's always puzzled me why one of the goals of contemporary recording is to get rid of noise and to eliminate any element of a performance.

Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist.

I've worked with all sorts of random people - everybody from Metallica to Britney Spears to Ozzy Osbourne to Michael Jackson to the Beastie Boys. I've got a really strange CV. It's interesting - I work with a lot of these disparate, different people to learn what it's like to work with random people.

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.