Albert Szent-Györgyi Quotes

The primary aim of science is to find... new truth. The search is the more successful the more it is directed towards... truth for its own sake, regardless of... possible use or application. ...If everything given to us by research were to be taken away, civilization would collapse and we would stand naked, searching for caves again.

The battle... is for the minds of men; the outcome... does not depend on numbers of missiles, but on the question of which system can raise life higher, give more happiness... and raise the great undeveloped masses out of their misery. ...Now there are two parties: democracy and communism. Why not embark on a noble competition by showing which... can create a better, freer, happier life?

Out children came into this world with "clean and empty minds." What they learn... is markedly different from... children of the pre-War world. Today's adults look... through glasses of pre-War and pre-scientific values. They think... all the world needs a little bit of patching... The result... we get deeper... into trouble. The modern scientific revolution had made all human s age faster... as a consequence we have a hypocritical world... Our youth rejects this anachronism wholesale. ...They find everything a lie. The great political parties... out for profit and power, the military for domination, fattening itself with their young bodies... churches preaching love but raising no voice against the slaughter of undeveloped people... driving the world toward overpopulation... resisting family planning... always on the side of power. And they see while half of the children of the world go to sleep hungry... we spend hundreds of billions to raise our stack of nuclear bombs and missiles... They see... most political leaders... mindful only of... re-election... keeping power... with arguments which should be rejected by the simplest logic, refuting the great ideals on which our country was built.

The great hope of mankind is still the United Nations.

Collective human suffering easily becomes an abstraction... being unable to multiply death or suffering by 100,000. This... is a number, an abstraction. One death is a tragedy. 100,000 deaths are statistics. So it must also seem to men in high offices.

Mi è impossibile cingere i fianchi di una ragazza con il mio braccio destro e serrare il suo sorriso nella mia mano sinistra, per poi tentare di studiare i due oggetti separatamente. Allo stesso modo, non ci è possibile separare la vita dalla materia vivente, allo scopo di studiare la sola materia vivente e le sue reazioni. Inevitabilmente, studiando la materia vivente e le sue reazioni, studiamo la vita stessa.

If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.

It is impossible to encircle the hips of a girl with my right arm and hold her smile in my left hand, then proceed to study the two items separately. Similarly, we can not separate life from living matter, in order to study only living matter and its reactions. Inevitably, studying living matter and its reactions, we study life itself

From on high a human life must look very small, a notion that moved Walt Whitman to sing about the arrogance and audacity of elected government officials. ...Unfortunately, this collective code of morals... [w]e all share... as soon as... we participate in government... when we go to the polls to elect hawks and vote the endless billions for war and... formidable machines for killing and destruction, and then go to church and ask for God's blessing.