Have you ever attended live or viewed an online TEDTalk? You know, those inspiring, funny, or fascinating talks from industry leaders and amazing people that take place around the world? Today, the TED nonprofit, which began in 1984 as an annual conference that brought together people from the technology, entertainment, and design industries, has launched TED Quotes, a web page on the TED.com website dedicated to featuring some of the best quotes from its TEDTalks.
It's a brilliant move; who doesn't love a good, insighful quote? We've been scouring the TED Quotes today and wanted to highlight some of our favorite ones from the technology, internet, management, and business categories. These quotes are easily tweetable and Facebook sharable via the TED website, and they can make great additions to your presentations and other marketing content. Enjoy!
TED Technology Quotes
1) Clay Shirky: Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming — not producing, not sharing — and we should say, 'No.'
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2) Ian Ritchie: [Tim Berners-Lee] told me about his proposed system called the ‘World Wide Web.’ And I thought, well, that’s got a pretentious name.
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3) Roger Ebert: Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.
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4) Evan Grant: Everything gives out some kind of data, whether it’s sound or smell or vibration.
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5) Aaron Koblin: An interface can be a powerful narrative device. And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain [our] humanity and tell some amazing stories.
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6) Ze Frank: On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it’s easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there.
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7) Nicholas Christakis: Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they’re so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve.
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8) John Underkoffler: That’s the old way, that’s the old mantra: one machine, one human, one mouse, one screen. Well, that doesn’t really cut it anymore.
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9) David Agus Quoting Andy Grove: No technology will win. Technology itself will win.
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TED Internet Quotes
10) Clay Shirky: We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
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11) Joe Sabia: In 6,000 years of storytelling, [people have] gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls.
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12) Adam Ostrow: By the end of this year, there’ll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites. The one thing that all of them have in common is that they’re going to die.
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13) Eli Pariser: Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that I was clicking more on my liberal friends’ links than on my conservative friends’ links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.
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14) Eli Pariser: In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. Along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that’s not actually what’s happening right now.
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15) Eli Pariser: Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But you don’t decide what gets in — and more importantly, you don’t see what gets edited out.
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16) David McCandless: Data is the new soil, because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we’ve laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it’s been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments.
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17) Stephen Lawler: We’re so constrained by browsing the Web, remembering URLs, saving favorites. As we move to search, we rely on the relevance rankings, the Web matching, the index crawling. But we want to use our brain! We want to navigate, explore, discover information.
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TED Management Quotes
18) Stanley McChrystal: Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure.
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19) Elizabeth Lesser: Don’t persuade, defend or interrupt. Be curious, be conversational, be real. And listen.
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20) Jason Fried: [Facebook and Twitter] aren’t the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings.
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21) R.A. Mashelkar: An innovator is one who does not know it cannot be done.
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22) Simon Sinek: If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.
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TED Business Quotes
23) Jacek Utko: There is no reason — no practical reason — for newspapers to survive
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24) Tim Harford: Ten percent of American businesses disappear every year. … It’s far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans. Ten percent of Americans don’t disappear every year. Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans.
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25) Lisa Gansky: A brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir.
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Which TEDTalk quote inspires you the most?
