Quotes from Jonas Salk

I have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing at the time, but as something I can guide by the choices I make.

What makes your heart leap?

I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.

This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.

Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.

It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It's my partner.

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.

Are we being good ancestors?

A wisdom deficit - fewer elders and even fewer people who listen to them.

I have the impression that the new generation of young people, are coming up on the scene with a sense "ancestorhood", and with more wisdom than was evident before.

I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.

One of the greatest rewards for doing can be the chances it gives to do some more - even better.

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.

I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.

Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience.

It is courage based on confidence, not daring, and it is confidence based on experience.

There is no such thing as failure, there's just giving up too soon.

Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process, and nature in marking man's papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive.