“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.”

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.

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.

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

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

Alfred Nobel regretted that his invention, dynamite, was converted to degrading use, hence his creation of the Nobel Prize, as the humanist counter to the destructive power of his genius.

If I don’t finish in the top three for the next Nobel Peace Prize, something’s seriously wrong.

When I got my Nobel Prize, I had spent hardly 200 rupees on my equipment.

All work is noble; the only ignoble thing is to live without working.

The consciousness of knowing how to make oneself useful, how to help mankind in many ways, fills the soul with noble confidence, almost religious dignity.

When a noble life has prepared for old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.