Quotes from Dominic Cummings

Vote Leave argued during the referendum that a Leave victory should deliver the huge changes that the public wanted and the U.K. should make science and technology the focus of a profound process of national renewal.

We need organisations like Vote Leave to operate permanently to give a voice to those who otherwise won't be heard.

The work of mathematicians on 'pure' problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion.

Billionaires who want to influence politics could get better 'returns on investment' than from early stage Amazon.

In the political world, big established failing systems control the rules, suck in more and more resources rather than go bust, make it almost impossible for startups to contribute and so on.

Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.

In a large bureaucracy, it is vital to keep eyes on the grassroots as they almost always will give you warning of problems faster than official signals (which says a lot about official signals).

There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics.

The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it is seen as 'the party of the rich, they don't care about public services.' This is supported by all serious market research. Another problem that all parties have is that their promises are not believed.

Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena.

Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates.

When comparing many things in life the difference between average and best is say 30% but some people are 50 times more effective than others.

CRISPR-enabled 'gene drives' enable us to make changes to the germ-line of organisms permanent such that changes spread through the entire wild population, including making species extinct on demand. Unlike nuclear weapons such technologies are not complex, expensive, and able to be kept secret for a long time.

The British political system is broken in many ways and needs big changes - the E.U. is not our only problem.

It is very very hard for humans to lift our eyes from today and to go out into the future and think about what could be done to bring the future back to the present. Like ants crawling around on the leaf, we political people only know our leaf.

Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.

Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.

The reason why Whitehall is full of people failing in predictable ways on an hourly basis is because, first, there is general system-wide failure and, second, everybody keeps their heads down focused on the particular and they ignore the system.

Fundamental to real expertise is 1: whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it's possible to make good predictions and 2: does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction.

Westminster has let the whole country down for many years.

Those of us from the Vote Leave team would never have gone to No10 to help if Boris hadn't told us that he is determined to change the Conservative Party - change its priorities and change its focus so it really serves the whole country. Most of us were not 'party people.' For us, parties are a means to an end - a means to improve lives.

One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else.

Speed and adaptability are crucial to success in conflict and can be helped by new technologies.

The biggest problem for governments with new technologies is that the limiting factor on applying new technologies is not the technology but management and operational ideas which are extremely hard to change fast.