George Wald Quotes
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There is nothing worth having that can he obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.
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Our challenge is to give what account we can of what becomes of life in the solar system, this corner of the universe that is our home; and, most of all, what becomes of men-all men, of all nations, colors, and creeds. This has become one world, a world for all men. It is only such a world that can now offer us life, and the chance to go on.
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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.
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A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.
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When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy.
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We are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.
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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.
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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.
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As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time.
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We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.
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Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
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The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life.
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So-called defense now absorbs sixty per cent of the national budget, and about twelve per cent of the Gross National Product.
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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.
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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.
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Death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
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The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking.
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There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.
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A lecture is much more of a dialogue than many of you probably realize.
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I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack.
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A scientist should be the happiest of men.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
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I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.
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