Science Quote by Mordechai Vanunu

That small phrase, "on the other side", does more work than a paragraph of argument. Vanunu is talking like someone who has lived in borders: inside/outside, silence/speech, captivity/freedom. The line’s plainness reads less like optimism than like a survival tactic - a way to claim one scrap of agency without pretending the cost wasn’t brutal.

Context matters: Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician, exposed details of Israel’s nuclear program to the British press in 1986, was lured to Rome by a Mossad agent, kidnapped, tried in secret, and spent 18 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. After his release, he faced restrictive orders limiting travel and communication. So when he says he can "at least enjoy some freedom", the "at least" is doing a grim kind of arithmetic: freedom measured in partial permissions, in limited movement, in the right to breathe air that isn’t prison air.

The intent is carefully calibrated. He’s not begging for sympathy or thundering in martyr mode. He’s framing himself as a rational observer of his own predicament, which is exactly what a state can’t easily dismiss: a scientist’s voice, emotionally restrained, stubbornly factual. Subtext: you can punish the body, you can fence the person in, but you can’t fully reclaim the decision that set this in motion. It’s a quiet refusal to let the narrative belong to his captors.