George Wald

“We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.”

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

“A scientist should be the happiest of men.”

“To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.”

“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.”

“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 am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.”

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

“The concept of war crimes is an American invention.”

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

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

“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.”