George Wald

Scientist

1906-11-18 – 1997-04-12

George Wald was an American biologist and physiologist known for research on visual pigments in the retina. He shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye. He taught for decades at Harvard University.

Quotes by George Wald

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.
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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.
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Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
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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.
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A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
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I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.
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You see, 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.
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The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.
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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.
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We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.
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A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
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