That quote comes from the CERN twitter feed, (http://twitter.com/cern) - and captures the excitement of the morning.

Geneva, 30 March 2010. Beams collided at 7 TeV in the LHC at 13:06 CEST, marking the start of the LHC research programme. Particle physicists around the world are looking forward to a potentially rich harvest of new physics as the LHC begins its first long run at an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.

“It’s a great day to be a particle physicist,” said CERN1 Director General Rolf Heuer. “A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.”

“With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson,” said ATLAS collaboration spokesperson, Fabiola Gianotti. “The fact that the experiments have published papers already on the basis of last year’s data bodes very well for this first physics run.”

“We’ve all been impressed with the way the LHC has performed so far,” said Guido Tonelli, spokesperson of the CMS experiment, “and it’s particularly gratifying to see how well our particle detectors are working while our physics teams worldwide are already analysing data. We’ll address soon some of the major puzzles of modern physics like the origin of mass, the grand unification of forces and the presence of abundant dark matter in the universe. I expect very exciting times in front of us.” Read the full release

For those who really want to dig in ASAP here is a link to a Flickr set of the The Large Hadron Collider - LHC Logs

More images: First 7 TeV Proton-Proton Collsion Events recorded, March 30th, 2010

The archive of the webcast isn't live yet but this is where it will be posted: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/Videos

Here is a video from Youtube titled "First Collision at 7 TeV from the ATLAS control room of the LHC"