Jonas Salk Quotes

If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.

There is no such thing as failure, there's just giving up too soon.

The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?'

Solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don't invent the answer-you reveal the answer.

[Who owns the patent on this vaccine?] Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.

Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what's been taught them.

Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do.

Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process.

I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

Find the right questions. You don't invent the answers, you reveal the answers.

I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.

What is ... important is that we - number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other.

Your dreams tell you what to do; your reason tells you how to do it.

Evolution favors the survival of the wisest.

The mind, in addition to medicine, has powers to turn the immune system around.

If all insects disappeared, all life on earth would perish. If all humans disappeared, all life on earth would flourish.

As a bio-philosopher - as someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and in a sense, we have become the process itself - through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and to anticipate the future and to choose from amongst alternatives.

What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other.

Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience.

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.

I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience.