Quotes from George Wald

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

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

A scientist should be the happiest of men.

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

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.

We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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