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

• When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves.
• For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.
• Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.
• Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts.
• Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.