The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

For scholarship - if it is to be scholarship - requires, in addition to liberty, that the truth take precedence over all sectarian interests, including self-interest.

Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.

The scientific and scholarly community is marked by the belief that the truth is to be found in all; none can claim it as their monopoly.

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

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

The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.

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

Individual scientists like myself - and many more conspicuous - pointed to the dangers of radioactive fallout over Canada if we were to launch nuclear weapons to intercept incoming bombers.

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.

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

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.

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

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

Our assessment of socio-economic worth is largely a sham. We scientists should not lend ourselves to it - though we routinely do. We should, instead, insist on applying the criterion of quality.

Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

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

Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.

Under this scientific and moral pressure, the Canadian government conceded publicly that the use of these weapons in Vietnam was, in their view, a contravention of the Geneva Protocol.

If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.

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

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.

What makes the Universal Declaration an epochal document is first of all its global impetus and secondly the breadth of its claims, a commitment to a new social contract, binding on all the Governments of the world.

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.

Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.

Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.

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

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.

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.

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

In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.

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

Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality ethnicity class and color.

Idealism is the highest form of reason.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

Statistics is the grammar of science.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think.

The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.

Scientists tend to be skeptical, but the weakness of the community of science is that it tends to move into preformed establishment modes that say this is the only way of doing science, the only valid view.

To my mind, the most important aspect of the Nobel Awards is that they bring home to the masses of the peoples of all nations, a realization of their common interests. They carry to those who have no direct contact with science the international spirit.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance.

We especially need imagination in science.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.