About George Wald: George Wald is best known for his work with pigments in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit.
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.
Our business is with life, not death.
Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of immortality.
In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.
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.
I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.
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.
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.
I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.
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.
To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
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...
The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them.
The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.
So-called defense now absorbs sixty per cent of the national budget, and about twelve per cent of the Gross National Product.
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.
Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
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?
