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Experience 25: BRAIN

Selected Quotes from Winners

“The mediator's role combines those of a ship’s pilot, consulting medical doctor, midwife and teacher.”

“The only people that can make peace are the parties to the conflict...”

“Peace is a question of will.”

Nobel Laureate: | /, Peace 2008

“Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear.”

“I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood. We were taught death. We were told that human beings exist in order to give everything they have, to burn out, to sacrifice themselves.”

Nobel Laureate: Alexievich | , Literature 2015

“In every great faith and tradition one can find the values of tolerance and mutual understanding”

“The obstacles to democracy have little to do with culture or religion, and much more to do with the desire of those in power to maintain their position at any cost.”

“Today's real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated.”

Nobel Laureate: | , Peace 2001

“Liberty performs miracles. To free men, everything is possible.”

“Hope is the strongest driving force for a people. Hope which brings about change, which produces new realities, is what opens man's road to freedom.”

Nobel Laureate: Oscar Arias Sanchez | Costa Rica, Peace 1987

“One can't tell writers what to do. The imagination must find its own path.”

“Perhaps humankind cannot bear too much reality, but neither can it bear too much unreality, too much abuse of the truth.”

Nobel Laureate: | Canada/USA, Literature 1976

“Man is a being realized when there is a reciprocity of respect.”

“Mutual respect is the basis of compromise.”

“Let it be stated clearly that to make peace a reality, we must be flexible as well as wise. We must truly recognize our own faults and move to change ourselves in the interest of making peace.”

Nobel Laureate: Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo | , Peace 1996

“Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.”

“A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.”

Nobel Laureate:

Aage Niels Bohr | , Physics 1922

“…, the majority of the urbanites in the industrialized nations have forgotten the significance of the words they learned as youngsters, "Give us this day our daily bread.”

“Where are the leaders who have the necessary scientific competence, the vision, the common sense, the social consciousness, the qualities of leadership, and the persistent determination to convert the potential benefactions into real benefactions for mankind in general and for the hungry in particular?”

Nobel Laureate:

Norman E. Borlaug | USA, Peace 1970

“It is clear that global challenges must be met with an emphasis on peace, in harmony with others, with strong alliances and international consensus.”

“Despite theological differences, all great religions share common commitments that define our ideal secular relationships. I am convinced that Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and others can embrace each other in a common effort to alleviate human suffering and to espouse peace.”

Nobel Laureate:

Jimmy Carter | USA, Peace 2002

“All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.”

“We are not by nature cruel.”

Nobel Laureate: John M. Coetzee | /Australian, Literature 2003

“If we want to reap the harvest of peace and justice in the future, we will have to sow seeds of nonviolence, here and now, in the present.”

“It's okay to be scared, but fear is different. Fear is when we let being scared prevent us from doing what love requires of us.”

“We need radical thinking, creative ideas, and imagination.”

Nobel Laureate: Mairead Corrigan Maquire | Northern /UK, Peace 1976

“I believe that democracy is the absolute value that makes for human dignity, as well as the only road to sustained economic development and social justice.”

“A national economy lacking a democratic foundation is a castle built on sand.”

Nobel Laureate: Kim Dae-jung | South , Peace 2000

“The affairs of mankind are in incessant flux. No relationship - between individuals or communities or political parties or countries - remains the same from one day to the next. New situations are forever arising and demand constant attention.”

“Peace does not simply mean the absence of conflict.”

“Peace is a frame of mind - Peace is also a framework.”

Nobel Laureate: Frederik Willem de Klerk | South Africa, Peace 1993

“The Koran swears by the pen and what it writes. Such a sermon and message cannot be in conflict with awareness, knowledge, wisdom, freedom of opinion and expression and cultural pluralism.”

“A human being divested of all dignity, a human being deprived of human rights, a human being gripped by starvation, a human being beaten by famine, war and illness, a humiliated human being and a plundered human being is not in any position or state to recover the rights he or she has lost.”

Nobel Laureate:

Shirin Ebadi | Iran, Peace 2003

“It should not be a surprise then that continues to breed conflict.”

“Today, with globalization bringing us ever closer together, if we choose to ignore the insecurities of some, they will soon become the insecurities of all.”

“There is no religion that was founded on intolerance – and no religion that does not value the sanctity of human life.”

Nobel Laureate:

Mohamed ElBaradei | Egypt, Peace 2005

“A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.”

“It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.”

Nobel Laureate: | , Literature 1997

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.”

“There's no such thing as a free lunch.”

Nobel Laureate:

Milton Friedman| USA, Economics 1976

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

Nobel Laureate: Gabriel Garcia Márquez | Colombia, Literature 1982

“We used our pains, broken bodies and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation.”

“We must continue to unite in sisterhood to turn our tears into triumph, our despair into determination and our fear into fortitude. There is no time to rest until our world achieves wholeness and balance, where all men and women are considered equal and free.”

“If women were part of decision-making in most societies, there would be less exclusive policies and laws that are blind to abuses women endure.”

Nobel Laureate: | Liberia 2011

“I see a tremendous amount of intricacy in the world and we have probably only begun to scratch at the surface of its intricacy.”

Nobel Laureate:

Roy J. Glauber | USA, Physics 2005

“Peace is movement towards globality and universality of civilization. Never before has the idea that peace is indivisible been so true as it is now.”

“Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.”

“And, ideally, peace means the absence of violence. It is an ethical value.”

Nobel Laureate: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev | Russia (USSR), Peace 1990

“The question of for whom do we write nevertheless plagues the writer, a tin can attached to the tail of every work published.”

“Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? “

Nobel Laureate: | South Africa, Literature 1991

“We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here.”

“The world needs an alliance – especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance.”

“When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us.”

Nobel Laureate: Jr. | USA, Peace 2007

“And there is nothing I like more than to meet books of mine – books that have long since flown the coop and been expropriated by readers – when I read out loud to an audience what now lies peacefully on the page. For both the young, weaned early from language, and the old, grizzled yet still rapacious, the written word becomes spoken, and the magic works again and again.”

“It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty.“

Nobel Laureate: Günter Grass | , Literature 1999

“For if we each selfishly pursue only what we believe to be in our own interest, without caring about the needs of others, we not only may end up harming others but also ourselves.”

“Today, we are truly a global family. What happens in one part of the world may affect us all.”

“Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each one of us individually. Peace, for example, starts with each one of us.”

Nobel Laureate: Tenzin Gyatso (the ) | Tibet/ Peace 2007

“I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.”

“I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.”

Nobel Laureate: | Ireland, Literature 1995

“All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality. Difference is of the essence of humanity.”

“The answer to difference is to respect it.“

“No-one is asked to yield their cherished convictions or beliefs. All of us are asked to respect the views and rights of others as equal of our own and, together, to forge a covenant of shared ideals based on commitment to the rights of all allied to a new generosity of purpose.”

Nobel Laureate: | UK, Peace 1998

“Sometimes language finds itself on the way by mistake, but it doesn't go out of the way. It is no arbitrary process, speaking with language, it is one that is involuntarily arbitrary, whether one likes it or not. Language knows what it wants .”

“How can the writer know reality, if it is that which gets into him and sweeps him away, forever onto the sidelines. From there, on the one hand, he can see better, on the other he himself cannot remain on the way of reality. There is no place for him there. His place is always outside. ”

Nobel Laureate: | Austria, Literature 2004

“We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.”

“Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.”

Nobel Laureate:

Daniel Kahneman | USA, Economics 2002

“I have always believed that resistance against repression and violence is possible without relying on similar repression and violence.”

“Our civilization is called human civilization and is not attributed only to men or women.“

“Despite great battles, the survival of the human race is the clearest expression of mankind’s yearning for reconstruction, not for destruction, for progress, not for regression and death.”

Nobel Laureate: | Yemen, Peace 2011

“If the world is an objective reality that exists independently of us, then humans themselves, even in their own eyes, are nothing more than objects, and their life stories merely a series of disconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder at, but which they themselves have nothing to do with.“

Nobel Laureate: Imre Kertész | , Literature 2002

“If peace, the ideal, is to be our common destiny, then peace, the experience, must be our common practice.”

“To the realist, peace represents a stable arrangement of power; to the idealist, a goal so pre-eminent that it conceals the difficulty of finding the means to its achievement.”

Nobel Laureate: Henry A. Kissinger | USA, Peace 1973

“Solitude is affectionate to writers, and it is in the company of solitude that they find the essence of happiness.

It is a contradictory happiness, a mixture of pain and delight, an illusory triumph, a muted, omnipresent torment, not unlike a haunting little tune.“

Nobel Laureate: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio | , Literature 2008

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of , to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

“How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.”

Nobel Laureate: | UK, Literature 2007

“In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.”

“I would like to call on young people to commit themselves to activities that contribute toward achieving their long- term dreams.”

“To the young people I say, you are a gift to your communities and indeed the world. You are our hope and our future.”

Nobel Laureate: Frederik | KenyaSouth, Peace 2004

“Today, the greatness of a civilized leader ought to be measured by the universality of his vision and his sense of responsibility towards all.”

“It may even be that Evil is weaker than we imagine. In front of us is an indelible proof: were it not for the fact that victory is always on the side of Good, hordes of wandering humans would not have been able in the face of beasts and insects, natural disasters, fear and egotism, to grow and multiply.“

Nobel Laureate: | Egypt, Literature 1988

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.

The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

Nobel Laureate: | South Africa, Peace 1993

“If the world does not learn how to show respect to nature, what kind of future will the new generation have?”

“I wish that a conscious sense of peace and a feeling of human solidarity would develop in all peoples, which would open new relationships of respect and equality for the next millennium, to be ruled by fraternity and not by cruel conflicts.”

Nobel Laureate: Rigoberta Menchú Tum | Guatemala, Peace 1992

“What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.”

“Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of a friendship between.”

Nobel Laureate: Czeslaw Milosz | /USA, Literature 1980

“What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.”

“Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of a friendship between.”

Nobel Laureate: Czeslaw Milosz | Poland/USA, Literature 1980

“A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

He only has a partial and confused impression of his books, like a painter creating a fresco on the ceiling, lying flat on a scaffold and working on the details, too close up, with no vision of the work as a whole.“

Nobel Laureate: | France, Literature 2014

“When I was in elementary school, I was very interested in science already. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I started experiments with chemistry sets at my home in . I was able to borrow a bathroom and convert it to a laboratory. My parents supported it. They were pleased. My friends just tolerated it.”

Nobel Laureate:

Mario J. Molina | Mexico/USA, Chemistry 1995

“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Nobel Laureate: | USA, Literature 1993

“After all, the more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become. If our mouth is banned, then we attempt to assert ourselves through gestures, even objects.”

“ You can defend yourself against an attack, but there's nothing you can do against libel.”

Nobel Laureate: Herta Müller | /Germany, Literature 2009

“I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.”

“If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.”

Nobel Laureate: Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul | Triniad/UK, Literature 2001

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

“If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.”

Nobel Laureate: Barack H. Obama | USA, Peace 2009

“I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the .”

“The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.”

Nobel Laureate: Kenzaburo Oe | Japan, Literature 1994

“In science, knowledge and understanding no longer appear quickly. Time, patience, trial and error are all essential ingredients in any screening process.

“I have always been guided by the words of Louis Pasteur: ‘Chance favours the prepared mind’. I believe that this is the key to investigating and unravelling the mysterious world and secrets of microorganisms.”

Nobel Laureate:

Satoshi Ōmura | Japan, Medicine 2015

“A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.“

Nobel Laureate: | , Literature 2006

“There was a time when war was fought for lack of choice. Today it’s peace that is the “no-choice” option.”

“Countries used to divide the world into their friends and foes. No longer. The foes now are universal – poverty, famine, religious radicalization, desertification, drugs, proliferation of nuclear weapons, ecological devastation.”

Nobel Laureate: | Poland/Israel, Peace 1994

“The only possible solution is peace, since war means only a useless spilling of blood, and, besides, a grave violation of the dignity of both peoples, and even those who are mere spectators of the conflict.”

“The social order we seek is not a utopia. It is a world where political life is understood in terms of active participation by the governors and the governed in the realization of the common good.”

Nobel Laureate: Adolfo Pérez Esquivel | , Peace 1980

“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.“

“So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.”

Nobel Laureate: | UK, Literature 2005

“The preservation of the territorial integrity of a country can be achieved only if those in power are sensitive to the basic demands and aspirations of the many indigenous peoples and nationalities that make up the country.”

“Brute force might silence and keep dormant the dreams and aspirations of a people but the anger simmering for decades will inevitably resurface and break-up the country.”

Nobel Laureate: José Ramos-Horta | East-Timor, Peace 1996

“The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival.”

“Above all, remember your humanity.”

Nobel Laureate: Joseph Rotblad | Poland, Peace 1995

“The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.”

“War is not the only arena where peace is done to death. Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.”

Nobel Laureate: | Burma/Myanmar, Peace 1991

“It is like a voyage of discovery into unknown lands, seeking not for new territory but for new knowledge. It should appeal to those with a good sense of adventure.”

Nobel Laureate:

Frederick Sanger | UK, Chemistry 1980

“I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.”

“A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.”

Nobel Laureate: José Saramago | Portugal/, Literature 1998

“Friends! We live in an age of rapid globalization. We are connected through high-speed Internet. We exchange our goods and services in one single global market, thousands of lights connect us from corner to another corner of the globe. But there is one serious disconnect, and that is a lack of compassion.”

“Let us globalise compassion.”

Nobel Laureate: | India, Peace 2014

“History will judge us not by what we say in this moment in time, but by what we do next to lift the lives of our countrymen and women. It will judge us by the legacy we leave behind for generations to come.”

“The window of closed chambers where men and women have been unspeakably abused are being opened, and the light is coming in.”

Nobel Laureate: | Liberia, Peace 2011

“And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die - art will remain.”

“But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of , a slashing to pieces of its memory.”

Nobel Laureate: Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn | Russia, Literature 1970

“Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.”

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”

Nobel Laureate: | , Literature 1986

“Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves.”

“I’ve mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself.”

Nobel Laureate: Wislawa Szymborska | Poland, Literature 1996

“I walk slowly into myself, through a forest of empty suits of armor.”

“Every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as a blueprint of a storm. Don't be ashamed because you're human: be proud! Inside you, vaults behind vaults open endlessly. You will never be finished, and that's as it should be.”

Nobel Laureate: Tomas Tranströmer | , Literature 2011

“Some critics complain that I lack “the vision thing”. But vision in its pure meaning is clear sight. That does not mean I have no dreams. I do. But I try to have them at night. By day I am satisfied if I can see the furthest limit of what is possible.”

“There are two traditions in . There are two main religious denominations. But there is only one true moral denomination. And it wants peace.”

Nobel Laureate: | Northern Ireland/UK, Peace 1998

“We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in koinonia, in peace.”

“We are not made for an exclusive self- sufficiency but for interdependence, and we break the law of our being at our peril. When will we learn that an escalated arms race merely escalates global insecurity?”

Nobel Laureate: | South Africa, Peace 1984

“Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams and placed the universe of literature within reach of the boy I once was.”

“When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. ”

Nobel Laureate: | Peru, Literature 2010

“I've always wanted to answer all the questions that nature posed for us.”

Nobel Laureate:

Klaus von Klitzing | Poland/Germany, Physics 1985

“Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past.”

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape.”

Nobel Laureate: | Saint Lucia, Literature 1992

“When I recall my own path of life I cannot but speak of the violence, hatred and lies. A lesson drawn from such experiences, however, was that we can effectively oppose violence only if we ourselves do not resort to it.”

“It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness and a mood of helplessness prevail.”

“He who once became aware of the power of solidarity and who breathed the air of freedom will not be crushed. “

Nobel Laureate: Lech Walesa | Poland, Peace 1983

“If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.”

Nobel Laureate:

James D. Watson | USA, Medicine 1962

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

“Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

“There is much to be done, there is much that can be done. ”

Nobel Laureate: Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel | Romania / USA, Peace 1986

“Someday there will be a "war" but no one will come. And of course, if no one comes there will be no war. And we don't have to go, we don't have to have war, but it seems to take more courage to say NO to war than to say YES, and perhaps we women have for too long encouraged the idea that it is brave and manly to go to war, often to "defend" women and children.”

“Let women everywhere from this day on encourage men to have the courage not to turn up for war, not to work for a militarized world but a world of peace, a nonviolent world.”

Nobel Laureate: Betty Williams | Northern Ireland/UK, Peace 1976

“Landmines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian - a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal.”

“The landmine is eternally prepared to take victims. In common parlance, it is the perfect soldier, the "eternal sentry." The war ends, the landmine goes on killing.”

Nobel Laureate: | USA, Peace 1997

“Language is the ultimate crystallisation of human civilisation. It is intricate, incisive and difficult to grasp and yet it is pervasive, penetrates human perceptions and links man, the perceiving subject, to his own understanding of the world.”

“A person cannot be God, certainly not replace God, and rule the world as a Superman; he will only succeed in creating more chaos and make a greater mess of the world. “

Nobel Laureate: | China/France, Literature 2000

“Despite my parents’ tireless guidance, my natural desire to talk never went away, and that is what makes my name – , or "don’t speak" – an ironic expression of self-mockery.”

“Humility and compromise are ideal in one’s daily life, but in literary creation, supreme self-confidence and the need to follow one’s own instincts are essential.”

Nobel Laureate: Mo Yan | China, Literature 2012

“Sometimes people like to ask me why should girls go to school, why is it important for them. But I think the more important question is why shouldn't they, why shouldn't they have this right to go to school.”

“It is not time to tell the world leaders to realise how important education is - they already know it - their own children are in good schools. Now it is time to call them to take action for the rest of the world's children.”

Nobel Laureate:

Malala Yousafzai | Pakistan/UK, Peace 2015

“Peace should be understood in a human way − in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.”

“Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.”

Nobel Laureate:

Muhammad Yunus | Bangladesh, Peace 2006