“If you don’t want to practice, you can hide it.” —11-year-old violinist Serena Huang, on why she chose the violin over the piano.

“Houston, we have a problem. We’re entering the second generation of no progress.” — Spacecraft designer Burt Rutan, on the stalled space program.

“We are now returning to an ancient form of marriage: one based on equality and symmetry… If there were ever a time in human history when we had the opportunity to make good marriages, it’s now.” — Anthropologist Helen Fisher

“It’s extremely important to design from within the community.” —MIT inventor Amy Smith, explaining her philosophy on developing tools for third world countries

“If you really want to know what society is going to be like in 20 years, don’t ask a technologists like me: ask kindergarten teachers. They are the ones that know what society is going to be like in one generation”. —Clifford Stoll

“The battleground is moving from the physical to the ideological.”—Warfare expert Jim Crupi

“Of the 6000 languages spoken in the world today, 3000 are not spoken by the children, which means that we are halving our linguistic diversity” – Photographer Phil Borges, on his work documenting endangered cultures

“The invisible force of internal drive, if activated, is the most powerful force in the world” —Tony Robbins

“For decades they worked in a provisional space, which means that they could tear down a wall or work with various formats, so the challenge was to come up with a new building while allowing for continuing this experimentation and flexibility” —Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus, explaining how the “acoustic enclosure” of the new Dallas Performing Arts Centre came to be.

“There is an ‘upgrade paradox’: If you improve a piece of software enough times, you finally ruin it.” — New York Times Technology columnist David Pogue