Adam Curtis

"Henrietta Lacks' cells are immortal. They are known as the HeLa cell line, and they have become deeply involved in all sorts of medical and genetic research - sometimes in the most unexpected ways."

"I have a suspicion that the politicians' revival of the old behaviourist ideas and techniques will be helped and reinforced by a powerful ally - the machines we have built. The computers."

"I have always wanted to make a series of films which would be like an 'emotional history' that conveys what it feels like to live through history as an experience rather than a grand story. It would be about the relationship between the tiny fragments and moments of personal experience, and the continual backdrop of big events."

"James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and '60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector."

"Journalists, whose job is to pull back and tell dramatic stories that bring power into focus, find it impossible because things like economic theory are both incomprehensible and, above all, boring. The same is true of 'management science.'"

"The latest rule is: you cannot have protectionism - otherwise you will get a world war. Other rules say you cannot have collective ideas that involve the surrender of the individual to the group - otherwise, you get totalitarianism or, even worse, religion."