 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. |
| 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. |
| Our business is with life, not death. |
| 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. |
| A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know. |
| So-called defense now absorbs sixty per cent of the national budget, and about twelve per cent of the Gross National Product. |
| The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them. |
| The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful. |
| A scientist should be the happiest of men. |
| The concept of war crimes is an American invention. |
| To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me. |
| 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? |
| And, you see, we are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense. |
| As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time. |
| A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. |
