Quotes from TED 2009

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished – that is the beginning.”

Juan Enriquez quoting Louis L’Amour

“Is it our machines or is it us that are wired for war?”

P W Singer on military robots

“Oh how’s your economy falling apart? Oh Ok, that a little different from how mine is!”

Bill Gates reporting on conversations this year at Davos

“English was the language of colonists but it has become the language of entrepreneurship.”

Nandan Nilekani on India growth

“Leaders are heretics not sleepwalkers.”

Seth Godin on creating tribes

“Follow the speed of the animals to understand how they live.”

Jacques Perrin on the making of his movie Oceans

“All of us has the exact same percentage of salt in our blood as does the water in the ocean. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.”

Jacques Perrin quoting JFK

“It’s too late to be pessimistic – we are all part of the solution.”

Yann Arthus-Bertrand – photographer and film-maker

“Seeing with the brain is often called imagination.”

Oliver Sacks

“We have built the Allo Sphere – a three story high sphere in a building – visualisation as virtual reality.”

Joann Kuchera–Morin – University of Santa Barbara

“All seagulls look as if they’re called Emma.”

Christian Morgenstern quoted by Golan Levin

“To those who have to go without two meals a day, God can only appear as bread.”

Mahatma Ghandi quoted by Louise Fresco

“American poet, Ruth Stone, perceived her poems as storms rolling across the landscape towards her and if she caught one she could write it down. But if she missed it, it would barrel on through the landscape until it found another poet who could capture it.”

Elizabeth Gilbert – novelist

“It is now possible to conceive a child who is to be borne two hundred years from now.”

Juan Enriquez

“Between stability and instability, in every public space, there is a desire to communicate something that is memorable.”

Daniel Libeskind

“It is important to remember that we are not at the pinnacle of our own evolution.”

Jill Tarter

“This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men’s devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life…and will soon learn to afford a standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time—perhaps for a long time.”

John Maynard Keynes from his essay The Big Slump, 1930 quoted at TED by Chris Anderson.

“Larger markets increase the incentive to produce new ideas.”

Nate Silver – economist

“When people say that’s impossible, they’re confused because by impossible they simply mean they don’t know to do that yet.”

Bruce Buenode Mesquita

“Wisdom is moral jazz.”

Barry Schwartz

“We must not just ask is it profitable, we must also ask is it right?”

Barak Obama quoted by Barry Schwartz

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.“

Thomas Jefferson quoted by Liz Coleman