“[Economists’ advice] is something like patent medicine – people know it is largely manufactured by quacks and that a good percentage of the time it won’t work, but they continue to buy the brand whose flavor they like.”

It is remarkable how little agitation there is against those practices.

The nature of the duties to be performed, the method of payment, the form of supervision, the tenure system, the market in which the workers find jobs, and the physical hazzards are all very different from the way things are in other occupations.

[On affirmative action:] Universities give a boost in admissions for other factors besides race, factors that bring no social benefit, such as athletic ability, celebrity of parents, and alumni connections.

The rising enrollment of women in the paid labor force is a straightforward consequence of the industrial revolution of two hundred years ago.

Whether the flavour of economic advice you like is conservative or liberal, you will find that flavour available from some ‘reputable’ economist, since there is no single standard to which all ‘reputable’ economists must repair.

To be a housewife is to be a member of a very peculiar occupation, one with characteristics like no other.

The liberation of women from exclusive domesticity did not originate in feminist books, or a war, or a big inflation, although they contributed to its progress.

To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.

Now we just really need to do the work, which we’re doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

You can’t save kids just with vaccines.

Penicillin sat on a shelf for ten years while I was called a quack.

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

If penicillin can cure those that are ill, Spanish sherry can bring the dead back to life.

Optimum nutrition is the medicine of tomorrow.

I believe that the time has arrived for medical investigation of the problems of manned rocket flight, for it will not be the engineering problems but rather the limits of the human frame that will make the final decision as to whether manned space flight will eventually become a reality.