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TED2008: Day 2 in Quotes

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“There have been bangs in the past. There will be bangs in the future. We may live in an endless universe.” – Physicist and TED Prize winner Neil Turok

“I have the modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry.” – Craig Venter, on his work creating synthetic lifeforms to generate alternative energy sources

“The line between good and evil is movable and it’s permeable.” – Psychologist Philip Zimbardo

“They’ve lowered the transaction cost of stopping genocide.” – Samantha Power on 1-900-GENOCIDE

“Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact.” – Paul Rothemund, joking about his work manipulating DNA, as if it were a computer program

“A lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate.” – Religion scholar and TED prize winner Karen Armstrong

“ ‘Temes’ [technology-enhanced memes] don’t care about us – they simply want to create more of themselves. Don’t think we created the internet for our own benefit – think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.” – Susan Blackmore

“Beauty and truth do not reside in the object themseles, but rather in the nature of the exchange between the object and the viewer,” -Thomas Krens

“Whoa dude, nice equations!” – Garrett Lisi, the “surfer dude” physicist, introducing his talk by displaying an enormously complex equation on screen. He went on to explain his controversial “theory of everything” without using equations