Quotes on Inspiration

The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate, effective, prosperous rule of law. It's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors. ... Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality.

If your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher. ... If your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher. ... If your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. It's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your own body size.

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

[Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.

My experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible.

[Bacteria] have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that ... allows bacteria to be multicellular. In the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference.

I'm both challenged and excited. My excitement is: I get a chance to give something back. My challenge is: The shortest seminar I usually do is 50 hours.

I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

A better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter.

When they teach [doctors] how to suture, they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful.

By slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better: They eat better; they make love better; they exercise better; they work better; they live better.

Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems.

[Psychics] use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do - the same physical methods, the same psychological methods - and they effectively and profoundly deceive millions of people around the earth, to their detriment.

I want [my daughter] to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind.

You think that social media is about hooking up online? For these kids [in the Tunisian Revolution], it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers.

If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk. It may be that they can walk three, four, five steps. That, to them, means they can walk.

That's what life is about: about daring greatly, about being in the arena.

Below an income of ... $60,000 a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. ... Money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.

The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too.

I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.