Top 51 George Wald Quotes
#1. 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.
George Wald
#3. 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.
George Wald
#4. Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
George Wald
#5. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.
George Wald
#6. The concept of war crimes is an American invention.
George Wald
#7. 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.
George Wald
#8. A scientist should be the happiest of men.
George Wald
#9. 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.
George Wald
#10. When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy.
George Wald
#11. A physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms.
George Wald
#12. We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.
George Wald
#13. About two million years ago, man appeared. He has become the dominant species on the earth. All other living things, animal and plant, live by his sufferance. He is the custodian of life on earth, and in the solar system. It's a big responsibility.
George Wald
#14. 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.
George Wald
#15. 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.
George Wald
#16. Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality.
George Wald
#17. We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.
George Wald
#18. We living things are a late outgrowth of the metabolism of our galaxy. The carbon that enters into our composition was cooked in a remote past in a dying star. The waters of ancient seas set the pattern of ions in our blood. The ancient atmospheres moulded our metabolism.
George Wald
#19. 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.
George Wald
#20. 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.
George Wald
#21. And, you see, we are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.
George Wald
#22. 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.
George Wald
#23. 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.
George Wald
#24. The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them.
George Wald
#25. I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.
George Wald
#26. A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
George Wald
#27. 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.
George Wald
#28. 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.
George Wald
#29. 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.
George Wald
#30. The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful.
George Wald
#31. As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time.
George Wald
#32. Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
George Wald
#33. A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better.
George Wald
#34. I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack.
George Wald
#35. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
George Wald
#36. We already know enough to begin to cope with all the major problems that are now threatening human life and much of the rest of life on earth. Our crisis is not a crisis of information; it is a crisis of decision of policy and action.
George Wald
#37. The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.
George Wald
#38. A lecture is much more of a dialogue than many of you probably realize.
George Wald
#39. The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life.
George Wald
#40. I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.
George Wald
#41. One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are-as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.
George Wald
#42. 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.
George Wald
#43. I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.
George Wald
#44. Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of immortality.
George Wald
#45. 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?
George Wald
#46. The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us; you may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.
George Wald
#47. 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.
George Wald
#48. Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
George Wald
#49. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.
George Wald
#50. I think if a physician wrote on a death certificate that old age was the cause of death, he'd be thrown out of the union. There is always some final event, some failure of an organ, some last attack of pneumonia, that finishes off a life. No one dies of old age.
George Wald
#51. The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking.
George Wald
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