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The Nobel award occasions a unique celebration of the vision of science by the public at large. The prestige the prize confers today is largely due to the extraordinary diligence of the Nobel committees.

The great esteem in which the Nobel prizes are universally held is due to the fact that for several generations they have been given purely on scientific merit and not through lobbying and politicking. I do hope that it will stay this way, and the prizes will never be given according to the number of votes in live TV contests!

Science is the quintessential international endeavour, and the sterling reputation of the Nobel awards is partly due to the widely-perceived lack of national and other biases in the selection of the laureates.

The Nobel Prizes are much more than awards to scholars; they are a celebration of civilization, of mankind, and of what makes humans unique - that is their intellect from which springs creativity.

With the variety of fields within economics, broadly conceived and the increasing specialization of scholarly world, the award of a Nobel Memorial Prize honors not only the individual scholar but, implicitly, also a special field or a distinctive method.

I can only point out a curious fact. Year after year the Nobel Awards bring a moment of happiness not only to the recipients, not only to colleagues and friends of the recipients, but even to strangers.

Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important.

And yet the Nobel Prizes, in singling out individuals, have done a great deal of good in pointing up to the world as a whole and setting forth clearly goals for achievement.

The truth is that anyone, almost anyone, who receives the Nobel Prize has some indirect knowledge of one sort or another that they may be a candidate.

The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.