Jonas Salk famous quotes

If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.
-- Jonas Salk

#Years #Earth #Disappear

The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?'
-- Jonas Salk

#Important #Be Good #Ancestor

Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what's been taught them.
-- Jonas Salk

#Family #Children #Home

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.
-- Jonas Salk

#Dream #Courage #Reality

I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.
-- Jonas Salk

#Inspirational #Dream #Positive Thinking

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.
-- Jonas Salk

#Creativity #Thinking #Innovation

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
-- Jonas Salk

#Responsibility #Be Good #Ancestor

If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born.
-- Jonas Salk

#Character #Responsibility #Angel

As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that. That's what motivates me.
-- Jonas Salk

#Children #Sides #Not Interested

Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.
-- Jonas Salk

#Ecosystems #Realizing #Environment

Your dreams tell you what to do; your reason tells you how to do it.
-- Jonas Salk

#Motivational #Dream #Thought Provoking

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.
-- Jonas Salk

#Thinking #Discovery #People

This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.
-- Jonas Salk

#Beautiful #Men #Technology

Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do.
-- Jonas Salk

#Risk #Pay

It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It's my partner.
-- Jonas Salk

#Morning #Sea #Intuition

I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.
-- Jonas Salk

#Inspirational #Fitness #Opportunity

When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm . . . the realm of the imagination guides my thinking.
-- Jonas Salk

#Thinking #Imagination #Polio

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.
-- Jonas Salk

#Errors #Evolution #Speak

I look upon ourselves as partners in all of this, and that each of us contributes and does what he can do best. And so I see not a top rung and a bottom rung - I see all this horizontally - and I see this as part of a matrix. And I see every human being as having a purpose, a destiny, if you like - the destiny that exists in each of us - and find ways and means to provide such opportunities for everyone.
-- Jonas Salk

#Mean #Opportunity #Destiny

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience.
-- Jonas Salk

#Information #Chance #Things Happen

Wisdom: It's something that you know when you see it. You can recognize it, you can experience it. I have defined wisdom as the capacity to make judgments that when looked back upon will seem to have been wise.
-- Jonas Salk

#Wise #Judgment #Capacity

It is courage based on confidence, not daring, and it is confidence based on experience.
-- Jonas Salk

#Daring

I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that's one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in a positive, creative, constructive way, revealing the truth and beauty that exists in life and in nature.
-- Jonas Salk

#Moving #Artist #Discovery

I couldn't possibly have become a member of this Institute, you know, if I hadn't organized it myself.
-- Jonas Salk

#Organization #Members #Organized

Find the right questions. You don't invent the answers, you reveal the answers.
-- Jonas Salk

#Answers

It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling.
-- Jonas Salk

#Epidemics #Self #Entrepreneur

I'm saying that we should trust our intuition. I believe that the principles of universal evolution are revealed to us through intuition. And I think that if we combine our intuition and our reason, we can respond in an evolutionary sound way to our problems.
-- Jonas Salk

#Believe #Thinking #Intuition

The worst tragedy that could have befallen me was my success. I knew right away that I was through - cast out.
-- Jonas Salk

#Tragedy #Worst #Casts

In my view, art and the approach to life through art, using it as a vehicle for education and even for doing science is so vital that it is part of a great new revolution that is taking place. I believe we are entering a whole new epoch.
-- Jonas Salk

#Art #Fun #Believe

A good parent gives their child roots and wings.
-- Jonas Salk

#Children #Parenting #Wings

I have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing at the time, but as something I can guide by the choices I make.
-- Jonas Salk

#Spiritual #Choices #Evolution

My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.
-- Jonas Salk

#Ambition #Thinking #Medicine

When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine, you don't sleep well for two or three months.
-- Jonas Salk

#Children #Sleep #Two

There is no such thing as failure, there's just giving up too soon.
-- Jonas Salk

#Giving Up #Giving

Charlotte's Web Life is magic, the way nature works seems to be quite magical.
-- Jonas Salk

#Pregnancy #Magic #Way

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.
-- Jonas Salk

#Cancer #Cells #Viruses

There is a moment of conception and a moment of birth, but between them there is a long period of gestation.
-- Jonas Salk

#Long #Gestation #Birth

Are we being good ancestors?
-- Jonas Salk

#Be Good #Thrive #Ancestor

I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution; because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time.
-- Jonas Salk

#Philosophy #Thinking #Trying

[Who owns the patent on this vaccine?] Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?
-- Jonas Salk

#Humility #Vaccines #People

I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?
-- Jonas Salk

#Knowledge #Thinking #Needs

The people - could you patent the sun ?
-- Jonas Salk

#Science #People #Patents

IT IS SAID TO AWAIT CERTAINTY IS TO AWAIT ETERNITY.
-- Jonas Salk

#Science #Eternity #Said

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience ... it's just chance that I happened to be here at this particular time when there was available and at my disposal the great experience of all the investigators who plodded along for a number of years.
-- Jonas Salk

#Years #Numbers #Information

As a bio-philosopher - as someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and in a sense, we have become the process itself - through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and to anticipate the future and to choose from amongst alternatives.
-- Jonas Salk

#Alternatives #Scripture #Philosopher

If all insects disappeared, all life on earth would perish. If all humans disappeared, all life on earth would flourish.
-- Jonas Salk

#Earth #Insects #Humans

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.
-- Jonas Salk

#Science #Vaccines #Safety

What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other.
-- Jonas Salk

#Philosophy #Two #Numbers

Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don't recognize the pattern and the significance. It's the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It's a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it's positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It's like a journey. It's like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else.
-- Jonas Salk

#Block #Journey #People

I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.
-- Jonas Salk

#Errors #Evil #Triumph

Life is an error-making and an error-correctin g process, and nature in marking man's papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive.
-- Jonas Salk

#Men #Errors #Survival