Other civilizations, including more successful ones, may exist an infinite number of times on the pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for the moment from nothingness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.

From Andrei Sakharov's Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, Oslo, Norway, 1975