NYU Alumni Magazine Spring 2008

“This man-made calamity—the great liquidity crisis—has had the same effect on the international [financial] system that the asteroid had on the natural world… There will be an extinction. Many, many species will not survive this change of atmosphere.”

Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of the recent book The Ascent of Money, speaking at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs

“The UN, which embodies all that should be good about international diplomacy, is suffering a crisis of legitimacy in many parts of the world because it reflects the distribution of power in 1945, and not in 2015.”

David Miliband, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, on what matters should be in President Barack Obama’s “in-box”

“[The Large Hadron Collider] will reproduce, in a very small volume for a very short time, the conditions last seen in the universe when it was about a 10,000th of a second old in the early moments of the Big Bang.”

—Nobel Laureate and MIT physicist Frank Wilczek at the Inside-Out speaker series, sponsored by the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism institute

“Having courage to look beyond your own personal safety, to realize a vision for coming generations, can cost you your life.”

—Her majesty Queen Noor of Jordan at an ecumenical dialogue on compassionate leadership, sponsored by the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service