Explore Quotes on Inspiration

Why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments?

Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.

One cup of food a day changes Fabian's life completely. But this morning, about a billion people on Earth - or one out of every seven - woke up and didn't even know how to fill this cup. One out of every seven people.

It's tens of millions of calculations just to design one connection between a piece of structural steel and another piece of structural steel.

When you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue. If you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow. And if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems.

The truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it.

[Wind energy] takes a very large footprint on the land, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm.

Why, in our age of science, [do] we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition?

It might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language.

Our world leaders ... need our help. They need the cavalry, and the cavalry's not going to come from Mars; it's got to come from us.

In many of our [online] courses, the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes - which is not a level of service I have ever offered to my Stanford students.

Even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain - happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life.

Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country [Afghanistan] is dominated by drug economy and a mafia; textbook economics does not work in my context.

Death is a part of life ... and that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does.

These disorders - schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction - they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

As architects we're trained to solve problems, but I don't really believe in architectural problems. I only believe in opportunities.

Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? Or, are we destined to become something different - something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment?

You take [mammary] cells, you put them in a dish, and within three days ... they don't make milk. They completely forget.

Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stockbroker already.

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.