Linus Pauling

I might well have become egotistical as a result [of the Langmuir Prize].... But... I think that I just said I shouldn't let this go to my head. I shouldn't think I'm really better than other people even though I do this one thing better than other people.

The problem of an atomic war must not be confused by minor problems such as Communism versus capitalism. An atomic war would kill everyone, left, right, or center.

Do you think that an American who insists on making up his own mind, who objects to being told what to do, to being pushed around by officious officials, is thereby made un-American? I do not. I think that he is being more American than people who do not object.

On many questions I have a better understanding of the issues than any politicians.

Science is the search for truth -- it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.

I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

Life... is a relationship between molecules.

I had begun to think about the theory of the chemical bond very seriously in 1926, '27, after quantum mechanics was discovered and then in 1928 I published a paper, a preliminary paper, and said that I would write more later on. I didn't write anything more for three years because the problem turned out to be such a hard problem, the mathematical problem, that I couldn't solve it.

Anybody could see that quantum mechanics must lead to the tetrahedral carbon atom, because we have it. But the equations were so complicated that I never could be sure that I could present the arguments in such a way that they would be convincing to anybody.

I confess that I had harbored the feeling that sooner or later I would be the one to get the DNA structure; and although I was pleased with the double-helix, I 'rather wished the idea had been his'.

To awaken an interest in chemistry in students we mustn't make the courses consist entirely of explanations, forgetting to mention what there is to be explained.

If there were nobody in the world but politicians, I would feel that there was no hope for mankind, no hope for civilization, no hope for the world.

My own estimate is that all of the people in the United States would be killed in a nuclear war, if we do not build fallout shelters, and that if we do build them and train the American people, all of the American people would be killed in a nuclear war.

I like people. I like animals, too—whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.

A good scientist thinks logically and accurately when conditions call for logical and accurate thinking—but so does any other good worker when he has a sufficient number of well-founded facts to serve as the basis for the accurate, logical induction of generalizations and the subsequent deduction of consequences.

I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing.

I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.

Vitamin C is the most important of all vitamins.

I have always liked working in some directions that people say, 'Well, that's ridiculous.'

I refuse to be intimidated by the word impossible.