The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.

A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.

If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.

I didn't have any Indigenous friends until I was in my 30s, and I'll always remember and be inspired by the remarkable friendship I had with Connie Bush, an outstanding Indigenous leader from Groot Eylandt on who was on the National Women's Advisory Council with me.

I vote for leaders, and honestly, I didn't vote much in the military because I served whoever is the commander-in-chief.

We are an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century.

I'm hoping that the administration and other thought leaders will succeed eventually in bringing the country back to the older idea that the American dream is having a career, getting a job, and getting involved in it, and doing well. That was the core of the good life.