Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.

Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.

Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.

The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end.

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

The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.

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.]