Sakharov

"Andrei Sakharov,"

said Tatyana Zaslavskaya,

"was the only one among us who made

no compromises.  For us,

he was a figure of the inner spirit.

Just the bare facts of his life, the way he suffered for all of us,

gave him authority that no one else had.

Without him, we could not begin to rebuild our society

or our selves.

Gorbachev may not have understood it quite that way when

he let Sakharov come home,

but he would understand it eventually."

In his Nobel Prize lecture,

Sakharov said

"Other civilizations, perhaps more successful ones,

may exist an infinite number of times on the preceding

and following pages of the Book of the Universe.

Yet, we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in the world,

where,

like faint gliders in the dark, 

we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of

unconsciousness 

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."