Linus Pauling Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.

Linus Pauling
I miss the old days, when nearly every problem in X-ray crystallography was a puzzle that could be solved only by much thinking.

Linus Pauling
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 "

Linus Pauling
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

Linus Pauling
The scientists of the past whom we now recognize as great are those who were gifted with transcendental imaginative powers, and the part played by the imaginative faculty of his daily life is as least as important for the scientist as it is for the worker in any other field — much more important than for most.

Linus Pauling
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.

Linus Pauling
An amino acid residue (other than glycine) has no symmetry elements. The general operation of conversion of one residue of a single chain into a second residue equivalent to the first is accordingly a rotation about an axis accompanied by translation along the axis. Hence the only configurations for a chain compatible with our postulate of equivalence of the residues are helical configurations.

Linus Pauling
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.

Linus Pauling
The coming century is probably going to be one in which the amount of suffering reaches its maximum.

Linus Pauling
I believe that you can, by taking some simple and inexpensive measures, extend your life and your years of well-being. My most important recommendation is that you take vitamins every day in optimun amounts, to supplement the vitamins you receive in your food.

Linus Pauling
Every aspect of the world today — even politics and international relations — is affected by chemistry.

Linus Pauling
Men will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences. Science will go on whether we are pessimistic or optimistic, as I am. More interesting discoveries than we can imagine will be made, and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.

Linus Pauling
There is no safe amount of radiation. Even small amounts do harm.

Linus Pauling
By the proper intakes of vitamins and other nutrients and by following a few other healthful practices from youth or middle age on, you can, I believe, extend your life and years of well-being by twenty-five or even thirty-five years.

Linus Pauling
No evidence compels the conclusion that the minimum required intake of any vitamin comes close to the optimum intake that sustains good health.

Linus Pauling
Chemistry is wonderful! I feel sorry for people who don't know anything about chemistry. They are missing an important source of happiness.

Linus Pauling
If the structure that serves as a template (the gene or virus molecule) consists of, say, two parts, which are themselves complementary In structure, then each of these parts can serve as the mould for the production of a replica of the other part, and the complex of two complementary parts thus can serve as the mould for the production of duplicates of itself.

Linus Pauling
It is the atomic bomb which is responsible for my being here tonight - just as the atomic bomb may be responsible for our all not being here a few years from now.

Linus Pauling
I like people. I like animals, too — Whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.

Linus Pauling
There is more to chemistry than an understanding of general principles. The chemist is also, perhaps even more, interested in the characteristics of individual substances — that is, of individual molecules.

Linus Pauling
In the solar system there are so many stars and so many planets and the process and the origin of life is a pretty straightforward one [extraterrestrial life] that will occur when conditions are right, when the chemical composition, temperature and other factors are right.

Linus Pauling
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.

Linus Pauling
Although physicians, as part of their training, are taught that the dosage of a drug that is prescribed for the patient must be very carefully determined and controlled, they seem to have difficulty in remembering that the same principle applies to the vitamins.

Linus Pauling
A substance showing resonance between two or more valence-bond structures does not contain molecules with the configurations and properties usually associated with these structures.

Linus Pauling
I believe that there is a greater power in the world than the evil power of military force, of nuclear bombs — there is the power of good, of morality, of humanitarianism.

Linus Pauling
We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same mechanism used in producing these striking structures that are crystals.

Linus Pauling
It has been recognized that hydrogen bonds restrain protein molecules to their native configurations, and I believe that as the methods of structural chemistry are further applied to physiological problems it will be found that the significance of the hydrogen bond for physiology is greater than that of any other single structural feature.

Linus Pauling
The scientist, if he is to be more than a plodding gatherer of bits of information, needs to exercise an active imagination.

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

Linus Pauling
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.

Linus Pauling