The applause is a celebration not only of the actors but also of the audience. It constitutes a shared moment of delight.

Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.

A wise man in China asked his gardener to plant a shrub. The gardener objected that it only flowered once in a hundred years. "In that case," said the wise man, "plant it immediately." [On the importance of fundamental research.]

A new sense of shared international responsibility is unmistakable in the voices of the United Nations and its agencies, and in the civil society of thousands of supra-national NGOs.

Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

Young people ask me if this country is serious about science. They aren't thinking about the passport that they will hold, but the country that they must rely on for support and encouragement.