Nobel Prize

Milton Friedman’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1976 Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a great honour and privilege for me to be here tonight, sharing in the reflected glory from my distinguished colleagues, not only the six fellow members of the class of 1976, but the many more…

Tjalling C. Koopmans’ speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1975 Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Also on behalf of my colleague and co-recipient of the 1975 award for economics, I wish to thank the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Foundation, and all our other institutional and personal hosts for the…

Friedrich August von Hayek’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1974 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Now that the Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science has been created, one can only be profoundly grateful for having been selected as one of its joint recipients, and the economists certainly have every reason…

John R. Hicks’ speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1972 Mr. Prime Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen, Economics comes in at the end; that (I am sure) is where we belong. Our science colleagues find permanent truths; economists, who deal with the daily actions of men and the consequences of these actions, can…

Simon Kuznets’ speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1971 Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen, When, over fifty years ago, I first became interested in economics – as a discipline that provided the key to social structure and social problems – it never crossed my mind that one day I…

Paul A. Samuelson’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1970 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The dream of any scholar has for me come true by virtue of this award. The Nobel Prizes are justly famous in the hard sciences, in literature, and for peace. Imagine then how my…

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes’ speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1913 (in German) Königliche Hoheiten, Meine Damen, Meine Herren! Mit tiefer Rührung spreche ich bei dieser Feier, welcher die Beteiligung des Königlichen Hauses ihren Zauber verleiht, meinen innigst gefühlten Dank aus für die mir heute erwiesene Ehre, deren Bedeutung noch dadurch erhöht wird,…

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. As a Nobel Laureate one gets asked many questions, some of them very peculiar indeed, but one frequent question that is quite reasonable is: What advice would you give to a student hoping to embark on a career in theoretical physics? Now I should…

Derek Walcott’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1992 Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Representatives of the Nobel Foundation, Honourable Members of the Academies, the Karolinska Institute and Election Committees, Students, Ladies and Gentlemen, The honour that you pay me is accepted in the one name that comprises all of the supposedly broken…

Your Majesties, Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, After that speech I am afraid I come as an anticlimax. I was asked to prepare my speech because I understand it will be captioned for the Swedish public, and so it will be difficult for me to change what I have to say, because…