George Wald Quotes

There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God.... There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility... that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can't accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.

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

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.

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.

Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.

I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.

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.

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

The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking.

Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis]

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.

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.

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

When it comes to the origin of life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!

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.

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.

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...

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 often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.

Our business is with life, not death.

All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.

A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

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.