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Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize in Physics
Leon Lederman: Let's take a metaphor. You have a trunk. And all kinds of combination locks and you know this trunk is important because you found it in an attic. It's covered with cobwebs, and must be really good. People are working on the combinations and you come in, sort of six months later, and they're all working on the combinations, and they have these papers and computer codes, and they're working out, and you say, "Look at all these bright guys. They haven't been able to get into the trunk. There's something they're missing." And you walk around the back -- the back is open. Nobody went to look at the back of the trunk. Well, it's kind of a silly metaphor but, in a way, science can often be that way. You know that a lot of very bright people have been working on a problem. You know there's a solution, right? So, you say, "What is it that they haven't thought about?"
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Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize in Physics
Leon Lederman: Many, many great theoretical breakthroughs in physics and mathematics were done by very young people. Of course, you have to know something, so that's experience, and experience grows with age, creativity is declining with age. You've got to find that balance between the two which will give you your peak years of accomplishment. If you have pure creativity, but you don't know anything, it's too bad. Sometimes it's bad to know too much. I remember Wolfgang Pauli, a very famous Austrian physicist, complaining about his own lack of creativity, said, "Ach, I know too much!" You see, if you know too much, then you don't have that fresh view which allows you to see the breakthrough idea.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
John Lewis: I was not the brightest student. I studied. I worked hard, but from time to time my mother and father, especially my father, wanted us to stay out of school and work in the field, and I knew I needed to get an education. I wanted to get an education. So sometimes when my father would suggest that we'd have to stay home and plot a mule, help gather the crops, I would get up early in the morning, get dressed, and get my book bag and hide under the front porch, and when I heard the school bus coming up the hill, I would run out and get on that school bus and go off to school. And sometimes my father would say, "You know, I told you to stay home, but you went off to school." And we would talk, but he knew that I saw the value of education and I wanted to get an education. I didn't like working out in the hot sun picking cotton, pulling corn, gathering peanuts, and I wanted to get an education because I knew I needed it, and I knew it would be better for me in the days and years to come.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
We need to find a way to make this world a little more peaceful. Maybe this generation of young people can get humankind to come to another level, to move to a higher level where we can lay down the tools and instruments of violence and war and stop the madness. Maybe in our own country we can do something about providing health care for all of our citizens, that some of the resources that we use to build bombs and missiles and guns can be used for education, for health care, taking care of the elderly, our children, the disabled, the homeless, and find a cure for some of the ills and diseases that impact human beings, not just here in America but around the world.
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Maya Lin
Artist and Architect
I didn't fit in in high school at all. And I don't know if it was because I was different. I think it was my age. I looked much younger than most of my classmates, and in a way they were really nice to me, but almost as a baby sister. I think as a little girl there was a bit of a China doll sort of syndrome. They were friends and they were friendly, but I didn't date. I didn't really even begin to understand. I was really naive. So I studied and I loved getting A's. I think I had the highest grade point average in my high school. And I loved to study, but I had no extracurricular activities. My activities were absolutely isolated. I would make anything artistic at home. And I think creativity and my artistic drive emanates from that childhood. In a way I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.
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Maya Lin
Artist and Architect
The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. It's almost a percolation process. I don't want to predetermine who I am, fanatically, in my work, which I think has made my development be -- sometimes I think it's magical. Sometimes I think I'll never do another piece again. But basically you don't know who you are. But yet I feel much better as I've hit the 40's, so to speak -- it's sort of frightening to say -- that I'm more whole because I understand. I'm more at peace. I'm not fighting it. I was fighting it in my 20's, really hard. I mean, it was a real -- there was an anguish in that. I mean ironically, the work is much more peaceful. All my work is much more peaceful than I am, and maybe the work, in that sense, is trying to find a resolution between what was probably a struggle.
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Maya Lin
Artist and Architect
The idea is there. It happens overnight sometimes. It happens when I'm at a site sometimes. I know it right away. And I knew it when I saw the site. I wanted to cut it open and open up the earth and polish the earth's edges. Then came the embellishment of the names having to be chronological, which had to be key. And it turns out a lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. Because I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time. So time plays out in a lot of my works.
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Maya Lin
Artist and Architect
I think what makes art valuable is: it is about an individual expressing what they think is a part of them, and variety and difference and clashes is what makes art valuable, that there is no one defining idea of what art is or what it should do. And that's what makes it art, that it has no rules, that it's so individualized in that sense. And yet, because we are born and we come from a very specific time, it is a reflection of exactly who we are at this time without ever having to be consciously thought of that way. It just is.
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Maya Lin
Artist and Architect
One of the key things in the architecture is that I want always to have you feel connected to the landscape so that you don't think of architecture as this discrete isolating object, but in a way it frames your views of the landscape, which is a very Japanese notion. So that the house is a threshold to nature, or basically begins to explore our relationship to nature. So again, this love of the environment comes back through all the work.
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