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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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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
People
Trouble
Things

More quotes by 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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Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
George Wald
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When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy.
George Wald
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Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
George Wald
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I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.
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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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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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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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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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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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.
George Wald
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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.
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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Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
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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I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack.
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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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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A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.
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