"...Então não seria o ataque de um presidente tosco e completamente ignorante que iria me fazer desistir de uma decisão de vida que eu tomei há tantos anos."

"Essa atração pela exploração, pelo desconhecido, para grandes viagens, grandes conquistas, sempre existiu no espírito humano, mesmo em condições muito toscas, ... muito atrasadas."

"Devemos sempre lutar contra os assaltos e os ataques à ciência, independentemente da nossa ideologia partidária ou política."

"A ciência sempre sofreu pressão de poderosos e seus resultados incomodam bastante; e as vezes em que os cientistas recuaram, não foi bom para a humanidade."

"“The leader of any country should be aware that in scientific matters there is no authority above the sovereignty of science.”"

""...My time as director of INPE was extremely important to me, including for increasing my own knowledge about other areas of science."

"The Bolsonaro government had no idea what its attack on INPE data would mean in the international context."

"...I said that INPE was a highly respected institution, that I had a name as a scientist and there was no way I was going let that go."

"...Outside Brazil, INPE’s reputation for excellence is well established."

"...To say to a scientist that your data is lying could mean the end of a career. And the data weren’t mine, but from my colleagues at INPE."

"Principalmente quando ele tem essas entrevistas com a imprensa ou mesmo em outras manifestações, ele tem um comportamento como se estivesse em botequim. [...] Ou seja, ele fez acusações indevidas a pessoas do mais alto nível da ciência brasileira, não estou dizendo só eu, mas muitas outras pessoa... Isso é uma piada de um garoto de 14 anos que não cabe a um presidente da república fazer."

"Qualquer dirigente de um país tem que entender que, quando se trata de questões científicas, não existe autoridade acima da soberania da ciência. Nem militar, nem política, nem religiosa. [...] Desrespeitoso foi o presidente da República com a ciência brasileira. Ele falou categoricamente que os dados do Inpe são mentirosos. Ele está acusando todos os cientistas do Inpe de terem cometido crime de falsidade ideológica."

"Aquilo foi um soco direto na minha alma de cientista."

"...I believed that I had two options. I could do nothing and write to Minister Pontes to give an explanation to the president. Or I could react."

"... I said that the president had adopted a weak, cowardly attitude by making a public accusation about a subject he has no qualifications to evaluate."

"I defended the INPE work. I knew that I would definitely be fired. But it was a successful strategy. INPE received so much media exposure that it was in an almost unassailable position."

"Those plans were also destroyed by the missiles of this war..."

"When most people think of nature, they want to look for perfection and for symmetry and balance, ... But if you really pay attention you are going to see that what actually makes nature tick are the imbalances, the imperfections, the asymmetries."

"...Our spiritual attachment to nature transcends religion, being part of our innermost nature as a thinking species in a mysterious cosmos."

"Science treads in the same footsteps of our ancestors, answering to our longing to understand where we fit in as we look up to the sky."

"Not surprisingly, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil scientists understood quite well the mechanisms of climate change and its broad implications for the oil business."

"I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. "I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe." Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, "Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that." And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and all that. This positions me very much against all of the "New Atheist" guys."

"Il y a une leçon à tirer de l'histoire des sciences, de la technologie et des sociétés, si l'on regarde les besoins spécifiques de chaque pays pour définir une politique scientifique, politique qui ne peut pas être identique partout : la base de tout, c'est l'éducation des gens, pour qu'ils soient non seulement compétents, mais surtout capables de créer de nouvelles connaissances."