"Many people think that dealing with protecting the environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore the problem. I hope the prize today could help everyone see that humans are capable of amazing accomplishments when we set about trying to do something."

“Presenting a model is like doing a card trick. Everybody knows that there will be some sleight of hand. There is no intent to deceive because no one takes it seriously. Perhaps our norms will soon be like those in professional magic; it will be impolite, perhaps even an ethical breach, to reveal how someone’s trick works.”

“The question that I first asked was, why was progress . . . speeding up over time? It arises because of this special characteristic of an idea, which is if to discover something, if any one person finds it, everybody can use the idea.”

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

“The amazing thing about cities is that they're worth so much more than it costs to build them.”

“We've maintained accelerating growth over time changes in our institutions. We have things like universities . . . patent laws, research grants which have created incentives for those individuals to engage in more discovery. . . . he rules of the game create incentives . . .”

“Economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.”