Linus Pauling Quotes

If a doctor isn't 'up' on something, he's 'down' on it.

Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn't contain potassium cyanide. It doesn't even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances. Therefore, these budding young chemists don't get a chance to do anything engrossing with their chemistry sets. As I look back, I think it is pretty remarkable that Mr. Ziegler, this friend of the family, would have so easily turned over one-third of an ounce of potassium cyanide to me, an eleven-year-old boy.

I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: "Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you." … The twenty-five percent is for error.

What astonished me was the very low toxicity of a substance that has such very great physiological power. A little pinch, 5 mg, every day, is enough to keep a person from dying of pellagra, but it is so lacking in toxicity that ten thousand times as much can be taken without harm.'''

When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect — but do not believe him. Never put your trust into anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair or has lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel laureate — may be wrong. The world progresses, year by year, century by century, as the members of the younger generation find out what was wrong among the things that their elders said. So you must always be skeptical — always think for yourself.

Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.

I have always wanted to know as much as possible about the world.

As far as women are concerned, I am old-fashioned enough to like the idea of a woman's managing the household. This is an important activity. A woman does not have to be a bank vice-president to find happiness. I should think routine work like sitting at a desk writing letters, making reports, or punching data into computers would be much less interesting and satisfying than running a home.

I've been asked from time to time, "How does it happen that you have made so many discoveries? Are you smarter than other scientists?" And my answer has been that I am sure that I am not smarter than other scientists. I don't have any precise evaluation of my IQ, but to the extent that psychologists have said that my IQ is about 160, I recognize that there are one hundred thousand or more people in the United States that have IQs higher than that. So I have said that I think I think harder, think more than other people do, than other scientists. That is, for years, almost all of my thinking was about science and scientific problems that I was interested in.

I realized that more and more I was saying, "It seems to me that we have come to the time war ought to be given up. It no longer makes sense to kill 20 million or 40 million people because of a dispute between two nations who are running things, or decisions made by the people who really are running things. It no longer makes sense. Nobody wins. Nobody benefits from destructive war of this sort and there is all of this human suffering." And Einstein was saying the same thing of course. So that is when we decided — my wife and I — that first, I was pretty effective as a speaker. Second, I better start boning up, studying these other fields so that nobody could stand up and say, "Well, the authorities say such and such "

Everyone should know that the "war on cancer" is largely a fraud, and that the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.

The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war.

The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used - we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immorality.<p>The time has now come for morality to take its proper place in the conduct of world affairs; the time has now come for the nations of the world to submit to the just regulation of their conduct by international law.

Planck’s constant and the quantum theory that is built around it are of extreme importance for chemistry—we may well be justified in saying that quantum theory is of greater importance to chemistry than to physics ... there is no part of chemistry that does not depend, in its fundamental theory, upon quantum principles.

We must not have a Nuclear war. We must begin to solve international disputes by the application of man's power of reason in a way that is worthy of the dignity of man. We must solve them by arbitration, negotiation, and the development of international law, the making of international agreements that will do justice to all nations and to all peoples and will benefit all nations and to all people. Now is the time to start.