Words matter. These are the best George Wald Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack.
As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time.
Our business is with life, not death.
Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of immortality.
In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
And, you see, we are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.
I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.
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.
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.
The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life.
I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule?
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.
The concept of war crimes is an American invention.
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.
We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.
Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.
A scientist should be the happiest of men.
It’s not good enough to give it tender, loving care, to supply it with breakfast foods, to buy it expensive educations. Those things don’t mean anything unless this generation has a future. And we’re not sure that it does.
As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of Americans who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million.
You see, 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.
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 have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.
A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.
A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
