George Wald Quotes

There's life all over this universe, but the only life in the solar system is on earth, and in the whole universe we are the only men.

Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.

Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.

All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.

I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.

We have fallen in love with the body. That's that thing that looks back at us from the mirror. That's the repository of that lovely identity that you keep chasing all your life.

Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.

The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one. It can give us no protection - only the doubtful satisfaction of retaliation...

The thought that we're in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial. We are one species, with a world to win.

We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.

There is nothing worth having that can he obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.

I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack.

We are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.

As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time.

So-called defense now absorbs sixty per cent of the national budget, and about twelve per cent of the Gross National Product.

A lecture is much more of a dialogue than many of you probably realize.

Death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.

The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking.

Every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years.

A scientist should be the happiest of men.

Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of immortality.

I think I know what is bothering the students. I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.

I can conceive of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a so-called superior (or, if you wish, advanced) technology in outer space.

The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them.

Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.

I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.

Not all living creatures die. An amoeba, for example, need never die; it need not even, like certain generals, fade away. It just divides and becomes two new amoebas.

A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives.

A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.

When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy.

A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

Our business is with life, not death.

The concept of war crimes is an American invention.

The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life.

There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.