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.

When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.

Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.

It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.

Though neglectful of their responsibility to protect science, scientists are increasingly aware of their responsibility to society.

Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.

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

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.

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.