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...

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

There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of the most important diseases a man must be familiar with their manifestations in many organs.

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

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

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.

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

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

Science, it seemed, held the key to an age of ease and plenty, and for many that proved to be the case. But for still more, it did not.

There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta.

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

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

The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.

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

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

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

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.

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

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

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

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

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.

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

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

It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.

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

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

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

That is of course flattering, since facts are incontrovertible. But it is also demeaning, since facts are meaningless. They contain no narrative.

What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?

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.

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.

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

Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants.

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

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today’s work superbly well.

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.

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...

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.

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

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

The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.

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.

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

Reality is no less precious if it presents itself to someone else. All are discoverers, and if we disenfranchise any, all suffer.

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.

The moral force that we brought to this debate derived from our membership in an international community ruled by law – albeit unwritten law.

The future is today.

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.