Top 73 Quotes & Sayings by George Wald

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

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

We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.

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.

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.

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?

Our business is with life, not death.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

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.

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

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.

The concept of war crimes is an American invention.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

A scientist should be the happiest of men.

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.

A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better.

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

The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.

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.

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

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.

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

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

And, you see, we are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.

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...

When it comes to the origin of life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!

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.

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

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.

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.

I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.

Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance.

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.

There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God.... There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility... that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can't accept that philosophy because 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.

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

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.

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.

Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis]