GEORGE WALD

We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A scientist should be the happiest of men.

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.

Our business is with life, not death.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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