“General acceptance of a practice becomes the proof of its validity, though it lacks all other merit.”

Do as much as possible for the patient, and as little as possible to the patient.

We physicians have focused on the nuclear threat as the singular issue of our era. We are not indifferent to other human rights and hard-won civil liberties.

The International Declaration of Human Rights says the right to housing, health, education should be guaranteed to everyone.

As long as we rationalize nuclear weapons as “necessary” in order to save American lives, then nuclear weapons will never be gotten rid of.

We must convince each generation that they are but transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity’s past nor dim its future.

Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real.

Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem Darkness.

I see nuclear weapons as the ultimate evil, not just evil, but the ultimate evil with the potential to make life unlivable on this planet.

But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others; the right to survival.

Nuclear bombs have made mass murder a reality. Nuclear bombs threaten humankind.

Some of life’s biggest and most positive changes are propelled by mini conspiracies of a few well-meaning folks.

The security provided by a long-held belief system, even when poorly founded, is a strong impediment to progress.

Once a new paradigm takes hold, its acceptance is extraordinarily rapid and one finds few who claim to have adhered to a discarded method.

The moment these things are provided, we will have a different world order and nuclear weapons will become less of a threat.

Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.

It may be laid down as a general rule, that no woman who hath any great pretensions to admiration is ever well pleased in a company where she perceives herself to fill only the second place.

That no generally applicable law of the formulation and development of hybrids has yet been successfully formulated can hardly astonish anyone who is acquainted with the extent of the task and who can appreciate the difficulties with which experiments of this kind have to contend.

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

At last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.