David Puttnam

“At its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost any other art form in popular culture struggles to compete with.”

“In the U.K., the history of regulation, certainly regulation of the media, is one in which, time and again, successive governments lacked the 'bottle' to enforce the powers that were available to them.”

“There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.”

“Without any doubt at all, teacher quality is the fundamental differentiator. Not just, incidentally, of education, but I would argue, probably the biggest single differentiator of success for the nations of the 21st Century.”

“Most parliamentarians don't have a clue as regards the challenges or the opportunities the games industry faces.”

“As intelligent and responsible filmmakers, working in a free society, we have a duty to ensure that our chosen medium is a force for good. Especially in this ever-more complex and difficult world.”

“Newspapers and their editors have to become as accountable as the rest of us - they are not 'a special case,' and they have only themselves to blame for having lost the argument for 'exceptionalism' - and with it the right to 'self-regulation.'”

“The most important thing I think teachers can do for young people is to make them inquiring, is to ensure that they know how to gather information, that they check information and they take their information from a multiplicity of sources.”

“There's always a miasma of misinformation emerging from the higher education sector as to which are the 'best' courses to take. My advice would always be to ignore the perceived wisdom and look for the most reliable evidence on the ground.”

“Film and the other creative industries are being transformed by digital technologies.”

“My belief is that no movie, nothing in life, leaves people neutral. You either leave them up or you leave them down.”

“What is certain is that plurality and diversity are not, and never can be, a natural 'byproduct' of unregulated market forces.”

“I absolutely refuse to accept the fact that any country in the world goes into a kind of film-making crisis. What happens is they lose confidence, they lose focus and the young film-makers of any particular generation can very easily get lost in that mix. It's happened in Italy, happened in France, happened in the U.K. during my lifetime.”

“I'm not naive enough to pretend that on its own cinema can capture the very soul of significant social and cultural problems.”

“At least in the West, politicians, corporations and media moguls can no longer take for granted their power to control the public discourse - and have it go unchallenged.”

“A vital step for the technology sector is to signpost legitimate search options far more clearly and to delete links to sites that promote illegally sourced content.”