A lecture is much more of a dialogue than many of you probably realize.
George Wald

A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
George Wald

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

A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives.
George Wald

A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better.
George Wald

A scientist should be the happiest of men.
George Wald

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.
George Wald

And, you see, we are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.
George Wald

As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of Americans who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million.
George Wald

As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time.
George Wald


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

I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.
George Wald

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

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

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?
George Wald

I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack.
George Wald

In fact, death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.
George Wald

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.
George Wald

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.
George Wald

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