The Aga Khan Award for Architecture seeks to make a better place in physical terms. This means trying to bring values into environments, buildings, and contexts that improve the quality of life for future generations.

Tolerance, openness and understanding towards other peoples' cultures, social structures, values and faiths are now essential to the very survival of an interdependent world.

The right to hope is the most powerful human motivation I know.

Islam is probably the one that places the greatest emphasis on knowledge. The purpose is to understand God's creation.

We cannot make the world safe for democracy unless we also make the world safe for diversity.

There is nothing wrong with being well off as long as money has a social and ethical value and is not the object of one's own greed.

If our animosities are born out of fear, then confident generosity is born out of hope. One of the central lessons I have learned after a half century of working in the developing world is that the replacement of fear by hope is probably the single most powerful trampoline of progress.