Linus Pauling Sayings

#1. Linus Pauling famously said, If you want a good idea, start with a lot of ideas.

Anonymous

#2. Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.

Peter Agre

#3. The best way to get a good idea is to get a Lot of ideas. - LINUS PAULING

Thomas Kelley

#4. For Christmas, 1939, a girl friend gave me a book token which I used to buy Linus Pauling's recently published Nature of the Chemical Bond. His book transformed the chemical flatland of my earlier textbooks into a world of three-dimensional structures.

Max Perutz

#5. I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

Max F. Perutz

#6. Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.
Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling

#7. I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world.

Dan Shechtman

#8. Linus Pauling would have us believe and perhaps correctly, that enough vitamin C will have us live another 20 or 30 years, I think the strongest power in the world is not vitamin C but the power of our own thoughts.

Frederick Lenz

#9. If the double helix was so important, how come you didn't work on It? Ther husband, Linus Pauling, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins.

Ava Helen Pauling

#10. You can trace every sickness, every disease and every ailment to a mineral deficiency.

Linus Pauling

#11. The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.

Linus Pauling

#12. Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress for the benefit of all.

Linus Pauling

#13. Life ... is a relationship between molecules.

Linus Pauling

#14. Everyone should know that the 'war on cancer' is largely a fraud.

Linus Pauling

#15. By the proper intakes of vitamins and other nutrients and by following a few other healthful practices from youth or middle age on, you can, I believe, extend your life and years of well-being by twenty-five or even thirty-five years.

Linus Pauling

#16. Provided one has the correct level of vitamin, mineral and nutritional input, the body can overcome disease.

Linus Pauling

#17. I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.

Linus Pauling

#18. Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.

Linus Pauling

#19. I try to identify myself with the atoms ... I ask what I would do If I were a carbon atom or a sodium atom.

Linus Pauling

#20. Every ailment, every sickness and every disease can be traced back to An organic trace mineral deficiency

Linus Pauling

#21. I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.

Linus Pauling

#22. Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.

Linus Pauling

#23. Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality.

Linus Pauling

#24. Optimum nutrition is the medicine of tomorrow.

Linus Pauling

#25. If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas.

Linus Pauling

#26. Science is the search for truth.

Linus Pauling

#27. I believe all complicated phenomena can be explained by simpler scientific principles.

Linus Pauling

#28. Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.

Linus Pauling

#29. Nations keep agreements, keep their treaties so long as they continue to do them good.

Linus Pauling

#30. I believe that you can, by taking some simple and inexpensive measures, lead a longer life and extend your years of well-being. My most important recommendation is that you take vitamins every day in optimum amounts to supplement the vitamins that you receive in your food.

Linus Pauling

#31. You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling

#32. I believe that there is a greater power in the world than the evil power of military force, of nuclear bombs
there is the power of good, of morality, of humanitarianism.

Linus Pauling

#33. The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Linus Pauling

#34. It will be possible, through the detailed determination of amino-acid sequences of hemoglobin molecules and of other molecules too, to obtain much information about the course of the evolutionary process, and to illuminate the question of the origin of species.

Linus Pauling

#35. The way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Linus Pauling

#36. Men will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences. Science will go on whether we are pessimistic or optimistic, as I am. More interesting discoveries than we can imagine will be made, and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.

Linus Pauling

#37. If you take a reasonable amount of vitamin C regularly, the incidence of the common cold goes down. If you get a cold and start immediately, as soon as you start sneezing and sniffling, the cold just doesn't get going.

Linus Pauling

#38. Do not let either the medical authorities or the politicians mislead you. Find out what the facts are, and make your own decisions about how to live a happy life and how to work for a better world.

Linus Pauling

#39. I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

Linus Pauling

#40. Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any molecule.

Linus Pauling

#41. Like thousands of other boys, I had a little chemical laboratory in our cellar and think that some of our friends thought me a bit crazy.

Linus Pauling

#42. Do unto others 20% better than you'd expect them to do unto you to correct subjective error.

Linus Pauling

#43. There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.

Linus Pauling

#44. The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used-we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immmorality.

Linus Pauling

#45. [Instead of collecting stamps, he collected dictionaries and encyclopaedias:] Because you can learn more from them.

Linus Pauling

#46. I think every person should be able to enjoy life. Try to decide what you most enjoy doing, and then look around to see if there is a job for which you could prepare yourself that would enable you to continue having this sort of joy.

Linus Pauling

#47. Every aspect of the world today - even politics and international relations - is affected by chemistry.

Linus Pauling

#48. No evidence compels the conclusion that the minimum required intake of any vitamin comes close to the optimum intake that sustains good health.

Linus Pauling

#49. I hear from patients who say their doctor said, 'If you want to take Vitamin C, go ahead and do it. It won't harm you, and it may do you some good.' More and more physicians are getting convinced about the value of large doses of Vitamin C.

Linus Pauling

#50. I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' ... The twenty-five percent is for error.

Linus Pauling

#51. We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same mechanism used in producing these striking structures that are crystals.

Linus Pauling

#52. The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war.

Linus Pauling

#53. [Professor Pauling] confesses that he had harboured the feeling that sooner or later he would be the one to get the DNA structure; and although he was pleased with the double-helix, he 'rather wished the idea had been his'.

Linus Pauling

#54. So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn't touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder - the famed double helix.

Sam Kean

#55. Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.

Linus Pauling

#56. [David Harker asked: Dr Pauling, how do you have so many good ideas?]
Well David, I have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.

Linus Pauling

#57. There is no safe amount of radiation. Even small amounts do harm.

Linus Pauling

#58. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling

#59. I have always wanted to know as much as possible about the world.

Linus Pauling

#60. In teaching, you do not want to COVER things, you want to UNCOVER them. The best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling

#61. I made use of the college library by borrowing books other than scientific books, such as all of the plays by George Bernard Shaw, the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The college library helped me to develop a broader aspect on life.

Linus Pauling

#62. Man's great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.

Linus Pauling

#63. The problem of an atomic war must not be confused by minor problems such as Communism versus capitalism. An atomic war would kill everyone, left, right, or center.

Linus Pauling

#64. Does the commandment 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' mean nothing to us? Are we to interpret it as meaning 'Thou shalt not kill except on the grand scale,' or 'Thou shalt not kill except when the national leaders say to do so'?

Linus Pauling

#65. Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City.

Linus Pauling

#66. If a doctor isn't 'up' on something, he's 'down' on it.

Linus Pauling

#67. Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

Linus Pauling

#68. Although physicians, as part of their training, are taught that the dosage of a drug that is prescribed for the patient must be very carefully determined and controlled, they seem to have difficulty in remembering that the same principle applies to the vitamins.

Linus Pauling