"We should want to cultivate our minds and intellect because we think that it makes us better human beings, especially that it enhances our ethical sensibility."

"An education that is devoid of ethics is empty and meaningless and will produce smart but reckless human beings."

"The benefits to society of having an intelligent and articulate citizenry are priceless; they cannot be measured in terms of GDP per capita or literacy rates or productivity"

"We need to start the conversation at primary school level. At the core of an academic mind is curiosity, and curiosity cannot be taught - it can only be nurtured."

"Children are naturally curious and I would argue that our education system destroys this curiosity and replaces it with anxiety about performance"

"Learning should be a joyous experience."

"Although access and benefit sharing has encouraged more equitable research partnerships in certain cases, from early on it became clear that that commercial demand for genetic resources was insufficient to incentivise biodiversity conservation."

"Rituals reveal values at their deepest level...it is the values of the group that are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies."

"I’m not naïve and I’m not belittling anyone’s experience, I just personally have not felt the discrimination and the idea that I’m not wanted here."

"I define success by my well-being and privilege to live a location-independent lifestyle that is filled with options and freedom of choice to live my life based on what’s best for me."

"I can say that you managed to increase staff research capacity and the development of staff in the faculty. You generated research outputs by promoting co-publishing, in particular. Your mentoring skills and supervision skills made such great impact for that faculty. You nurtured emerging scholars (and) promoted knowledge dissemination through encouraging students to attend conferences and present papers and attend seminars, particularly masters and doctoral workshops. We have seen the fruits of the work that you have done"

"You have made valuable contribution to the Faculty of Education and for that we will forever remember you. You have served this institution with wisdom, with respect and the humility that is in you. Your return to the university in 2016 was a confirmation that we believe in developing our own timber and today I want to say that we are planting you where you are going but you will return to this university once more."

"Part of the issue is whether higher education institutions create an enabling environment for female academics to thrive."

"You do not have to be collaborators. You do not"

"Many women were afraid to report abuse,"

"I am incredibly grateful for the hard work and dedication of our administrative staff, they are an essential part of our university community, and I am proud to have them on our team."

"When you come up to postgraduate level, you do get that the numbers percentage of female to male students become smaller. By the time you come to PhD level, that percentage reduces. It’s almost like looking at a pipeline and that pipeline leaks as you go along before you reach the end of the pipe itself."

"If a protest takes place without notice but is premeditated, even if it is peaceful, it can be classified as a crime, triggering the opening of a docket."

"Violence against the police has also been a persistent problem, reducing morale and driving up violent responses. The police have claimed to be under siege from violent protesters but, at the same time, the police have proved to be far from impartial in responding to these protests."

"The police service is clearly a stressed institution. Considering the high levels of crime in South Africa, the ratio of police to population is on the lower end of the global scale. Those who can afford it opt for private security, which lacks accountability."

"Failure to notify is not, in itself, sufficient reason to break up a protest if it is peaceful and unarmed."

"If a protest does not pose a serious threat to public safety, it should not be prevented, even if the municipality had not been informed about it. The Constitution protects people’s right to assemble."

"Municipal decision-making sets a framework for police actions — in that prohibited protests are more likely to trigger police actions than ones that aren’t — but the police can exercise discretion in how they respond to such collective action."

"It is the easier route for universities to say and do “security” in response to growing campus unrest. But it is also the more simplistic road. There is enough scholarship to show that this road leads nowhere. University actors must do more to break with this self-fulfilling prophecy."

"State repression creates solidarity among movement participants, who justify the need for violence as a form of self-defence."

"Protests that are sustained over a period of time are usually part of a cycle that unfolds in interaction with the authorities and other protesters."

"If netizens want to live free from fear and want, offline and on, then they will not achieve this by handing decision-making about the internet to increasingly secretive, unaccountable governments. Trading freedom for security is no security at all."

"Internet rights are not as important as media rights at the moment, but any freedom of information lobby with some foresight needs to recognise that the internet will be at the heart of future media systems, and they need to adapt their advocacy strategies accordingly by including an internet component."

"There is no doubt that media consumption habits are going to change quite fundamentally in the future, with an increasing reliance on the internet as a source of information and as a communicative tool."

"Gender violence should be seen as a patriarchy control mechanism, since it is systemic and rooted in sexist cultural practices and perspectives and it leads women to adjust behavior in order to avoid violence"

"Christian idea of sin — that tragic flaw at the core of human experience provides one of the best tools for understanding the evils of sexism, patriarchy, and traditional sin-talk itself."

"We live in a different time than we lived in a year ago. And I wish we were sitting here talking about this dystopian fictional world, and how glad we are that we’re not intent."

"We have to balance mission-oriented investments with curiosity investments, because the discoveries from curiosity research enable the innovation for mission-driven science. Undertaking biomedical research is high-risk, and more often than not does not produce the desired outcomes. However, we learn and understand the phenomenon better and move forward incrementally. This persistence and perseverance is a hallmark of scientific endeavours together with vigorous debates and discussions of findings."

"The idea behind access and benefit sharing policy is laudable: it was created to try to harness the economic benefits of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge as a way to achieve economic and social justice, and to fund biodiversity conservation."

"We can’t think of problems in the global south as just problems for the global south."

"We focused on developing and testing technologies that empowered women."

"Environments can be created where women feel they belong, and we can see from the 20 years of CAPRISA’s existence how creating a supportive space for women has enabled a lot of women to thrive, to make their contributions and be constantly making cutting-edge contributions. So this is a concrete example. It’s not just rhetoric; it's not idealism that we can make it happen, and we need to illustrate that more and more because that means inclusivity at all levels, which bodes well for human security and planetary health."

"And it’s not a token affirmative action process, but creating the space for women’s voices to be heard, women to contribute in the context of complex challenges that face us is no longer a luxury – we need all voices heard and opportunities created for all to contribute."

"When solutions are not shared fairly or equitably, the pathogen thrives, as we witnessed during COVID-19, and another example where sharing information openly as South African scientists did during the emergence of the Omicron variant resulted in a travel ban by several countries in the Global North for the entire southern African region."

"When we come together with unity of purpose, we can achieve great things."

"Women continue to inspire me to persist with my scientific endeavors. While some progress has been made, much more remains to be done to ensure a non-sexist and just society."

"For most of my life I thought about science and its application to leaving people better off, so I wanted to be a scientist and do something that would help people."

"The vulnerability of young women is very much tied into gender power differences in society."

"As far as women go, there's a lot more we still need to do."

"I want to help women achieve their career goals and navigate obstacles, and provide our alumnae with ongoing education and the opportunity to share their experiences."

"Once you engage the people who are managing a system, they can change the way they're thinking about it and actually influence the future, so it's very interactive."

"People see certain things and draw conclusions that are actually valid for the data they have. But then somebody else goes to investigate, maybe at a different time or using a bit of a different approach, collects a different set of data, and they get a different answer."