85 Quotes by George Wald

Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance.

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.

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.

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.

I think if a physician wrote on a death certificate that old age was the cause of death, he’d be thrown out of the union. There is always some final event, some failure of an organ, some last attack of pneumonia, that finishes off a life. No one dies of old age.

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.

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.

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.

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.