People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers.

The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success.

We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we're doing is right.

The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.

Society needs both justice and compassion, a head and a heart, if it is to be civilised.

The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.

If I'm a CEO and I say, 'Misogyny will not be tolerated', that's a more powerful statement than 'It is my sincere hope and our intention to eradicate misogyny from this company'. Sometimes saying things in that more categorical form, has a real function. Although, if you dig beneath it, it is actually one of J.L. Austin's illocutionary acts; you're trying to make something happen rather than describing something already happened. The fact that it has the grammatical form of a description is fine.