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The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one. It can give us no protection - only the doubtful satisfaction of retaliation...

George Wald

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George Wald
Age: 90 †
Born: 1906
Born: November 18
Died: 1997
Died: April 12
Biochemist
Biologist
Chemist
Neuroscientist
Physician
Physiologist
Scientist
New York City
New York
Satisfaction
Using
Somebody
Retaliation
Use
Atomic
Keep
Doubtful
Else
Bomb
Give
Bombs
Giving
Protection

More quotes by George Wald

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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.
George Wald
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Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
George Wald
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The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life.
George Wald
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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.
George Wald
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Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
George Wald
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A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy.
George Wald
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We are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.
George Wald
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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.
George Wald
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The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all and for that I am especially grateful.
George Wald
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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.
George Wald
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Not all living creatures die. An amoeba, for example, need never die it need not even, like certain generals, fade away. It just divides and becomes two new amoebas.
George Wald
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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.
George Wald
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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.
George Wald
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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.
George Wald
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A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
George Wald
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Since we have had a history, men have pursued an ideal of immortality.
George Wald
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The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them.
George Wald
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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.
George Wald
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Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
George Wald
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I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.
George Wald