Philosophy

This realization that everywhere you look is home and everywhere you look there is something new and beautiful and wonderful to discover. It is a real lesson in Earthling and Earth appreciation.

NASA Astronaut & ISS Expedition Crew Member

It absolutely never failed to amaze and lure me in. In fact, if I was at the window during the work day, I had to set a timer on my watch, because I would just get immersed in the view. It's like a transcendence; I just started doing meditation, and it's a little like that where you can just completely separate yourself and just be sucked into it.

NASA Astronaut & ISS Expedition Crew Member

Everything is just crystal-clear and glowing. Our planet just glows with all the colours you know Earth to be made of, but in a way, that's almost transparent, iridescent. Seeing our planet from space is so much more than a visual experience, I think it's about feeling it, I think it really is about having a kind of spiritual connection to it, that you feel. Total awe, humbling.

NASA Astronaut & ISS Expedition Crew Member

Entrepreneurs that do it for greed of money fail. Entrepreneurship isn't about greed, it has nothing to do with that; what matters is personal freedom.

Shark Tank investor, businessman, and former Canadian political candidate

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

Either as a startup founder or a venture capital investor, you should not care about what others believe to be exciting or overhyped. Do your own primary research and make up your own mind.

The real strength of our culture lies in what happens once our basic needs are met. As social capital develops, humans become increasingly able to perform feats way beyond the biological and cognitive limitations of the individual.

Biologist and systems theorist known for work on evolution and social cooperation

We have the unusual paradox of being both highly individualistic, yet in essence social. We exist in what I describe as a collective survival exercise.

Biologist and systems theorist known for work on evolution and social cooperation

Soup kitchens are good, but they don't prevent homelessness. You can go to volunteer at a soup kitchen every day of the year, and you'll still have homeless people. We wanted to tackle root causes and tackle them globally.

Co-Founder of Atlassian & Technology Entrepreneur

The world is so impossibly complex, beautiful and fragile and this gives us so many questions that we should ask. Curiosity is powerful, and that is the heart of TED.

Curator of TED Talks & Author of "The Long Tail

A refugee, we might say, is a person fleeing life-threatening conditions. In daily parlance and for journalist purposes this is roughly the meaning of refugeehood. Predictably, in legal and political circles, among those officials who formulate refugee policies for states and international agencies, the meaning is considerably more circumscribed.

The 'Silicon Valley' mindset is one where you race ahead and build technology, and if people adopt it and use it, you scale. Success in this mindset is measured in terms of numbers of users, revenue and valuation. How do these measures illustrate social good though?

CEO and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation

Understanding superhumans is to understand human potential. We have this immense potential which isn't always fulfilled individually, or as a species. I wanted to grab that by the scruff of the neck and write something positive about the best we can be.

I remember one day though, conversing with a primatologist and saying, 'oh, animals are just like us… we're not that special…' and he said, 'well, when did chimps build their own large hadron collider?' – I was gob smacked. That one comment made me realise how absurd it is to claim we aren't that different from other animals because, clearly, we're amazingly different.

When you're starting out, your ambition shouldn't be defined by someone else's success criteria. That's something I struggled with, and still do.

Founder of Moz, SEO software company and industry thought leader

It can be understood as the undermining of the human will. It starts with distraction in the moment where our ability to focus is fragmented – but then it runs deeper into how it distracts us into living according to certain habits, values and norms.