“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.

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.

I recently did the David Letterman Show about my book. He was very serious and made no jokes and it caught me off guard a little bit. He was much more serious than some of the joke shows that journalists get on.

In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires – rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.

I just went to Harvard a little while, because I graduated from Armstrong High School in Washington and then I went up there but I didn’t stay that long because I went into show business.

I always loved Little Anthony and the Imperials. They were like the precursors of the Temptations. I loved their music.

It’s incredible how one song or even one little phrase or just a few notes, if you really concentrate on it, can be a kaleidoscope of possibility.

I can think of plenty of writers whose work I revere and whose lives I know little about.

When I am in form, my style is a little bit stubborn, almost brutal. Sometimes I feel a great spirit of fight which drives me on.

C++ is my favorite garbage collected language because it generates so little garbage