14 February 2012

“A world without love is a deadly place”: Celebrating Valentine’s Day with the launch of TED Quotes

Everyone loves a good quote. They challenge us. They change us. They make us think and make us laugh. They are — in their most compressed and contagious form — ideas. So today, we’re launching TED Quotes, a new initiative that collects memorable quotes from TEDTalks, groups them by category, and makes them as easy to share as our talks themselves.

To celebrate our Valentine’s Day launch, we offer you these heart-fluttering favorites:

“A world without love is a deadly place.” — Helen Fisher

“[You need] eight hugs a day. You’ll be happier and the world will be a better place.” — Paul Zak

“People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It’s one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.” — Helen Fisher

“My wife could turn to me and she may say, ‘Why do you love me?’ And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, ‘Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors.’” — Robin Ince

Designed to make TEDTalks even more accessible, digestible and shareable, the TED Quotes section of TED.com serves as a resource for both discovering new TEDTalks and finding culturally relevant quotes for any purpose, from a boardroom pitch to a wedding toast. We’ve sorted hundreds of the best quotes into TED-like topics, from technology, entertainment and design, to collaboration, DNA, and, yes, love.

But this isn’t just about a greeting-card quips. In today’s social-media driven world, quotes have a new power: They’ve emerged as one of the most widely shared content forms online. So with this initiative, we’re now treating individual quotes within TEDTalks as shareable media objects.

When you share a quote, you’re linked back to a page that allows you to either watch the full talk, or jump straight to the moment the quote was uttered. Viewers can then, if so inspired, re-share the same quote on Twitter, Facebook, email and other channels. By making the ideas within a talk even more findable and shareable, we hope to spread ideas even farther …

Explore ted.com/quotes >>

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