Dan Shechtman

When my grandchildren are older and my great-grandchildren start growing up, first of all, I want them to be in Israel. I don't want them to leave the country because they have no choice.

As far as innovation goes, I can tell you that Korean students are reluctant to step out of line. If I ask questions, nobody raises their hands - not because they don't know the answers, but because they don't want to step out of line.

Young people in Israel are encouraged to design, produce and sell their products from high school. Technical universities also matter. Teach and introduce entrepreneurship courses in technical universities.

Select a subject that interests you and make an effort to become an expert in that field. I promise you, if you make the effort, and you become an expert, you will have a wonderful career.

Me as president would not be like anybody else as president. Everyone does the job differently.

Crystallographers believed in X-ray results, which are of course very accurate. But the x-rays are limited, and electron microscopy filled the gap, and so the discovery of quasicrystals could have been discovered only by electron microscopy, and the community of crystallographers, for several years, was not willing to listen.

In most cases, the news is not really news. But in some cases, discoveries are made and should be listened to.

Wherever I go in the world, I'm treated like royalty.

A humble scientist is a good scientist.

I fell in love with science and decided to continue for my Ph.D., and from there on, I was a scientist.

I think the main lesson that I have learned is that a good scientist is a humble scientist who is open-minded to listen to other scientists when they discover something.

Colleges will try to get the good students. That's the way to go. When I chaired my department of Materials Engineering at the Technion in 1990, we started a program for which we set the bar very high. It was the highest at the Technion, above electrical engineering and medicine.