JONAS SALK

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The worst tragedy that could have befallen me was my success. I knew right away that I was through - cast out.

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

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

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.

Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do.

There are three stages of truth. First is that it can't be true, and that's what they said. “You couldn't immunize against polio with a killed-virus vaccine.” Second phase: they say, "Well, if it's true, it's not very important. And the third stage is, 'Well, we've known it all along.

We were told in one lecture that it was possible to immunize against diphtheria and tetanus by the use of chemically treated toxins, or toxoids. And the following lecture, we were told that for immunization against a virus disease, you have to experience the infection, and that you could not induce immunity with the so-called "killed" or inactivated, chemically treated virus preparation. Well, somehow, that struck me. What struck me was that both statements couldn't be true.

Neither wisdom nor good will is now dominant. Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.

The people own the vaccine … There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don't recognize the pattern and the significance. It's the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It's a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it's positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It's like a journey. It's like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else.

The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?'

In my view, art and the approach to life through art, using it as a vehicle for education and even for doing science is so vital that it is part of a great new revolution that is taking place. I believe we are entering a whole new epoch.

Evolution favors the survival of the wisest.

There is a moment of conception and a moment of birth, but between them there is a long period of gestation.

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

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

Solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don't invent the answer-you reveal the answer.

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.