Linus Pauling

I am not interested in fame or fortune. I am interested in truth.

The pursuit of knowledge is an endless journey.

I think that the most important thing is to be honest with yourself and with others.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

I am an optimist. I believe that the human race will solve its problems.

The best way to learn is to teach.

I have always been a rebel.

The greatest adventure is to live your dreams.

Vitamin C is the best natural antihistamine.

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

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.

Like thousands of other boys, I had a little chemical laboratory in our cellar and think that some of our friends thought me a bit crazy.

Well David, I have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.

I was able to solve this problem because I don't have a computer. I know what I am doing every step, and the steps go slowly enough that I can think.

Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City.

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.

Everyone should know that the 'war on cancer' is largely a fraud.

I had something of a shock when I went to Europe in 1926 and discovered that there were a good number of people around that I thought to be smarter than me.

The department of chemistry [at Harvard] seemed to me to be rather uncooperative in that the different professors ran their own little groups...I just thought that I wouldn't feel at home there....

Well, I thought, that's nice of the old guy to say that, but I'm a little skeptical myself. And as the years went by, I thought, I don't do the sort of work for which Nobel Prizes are given.