Jonas Salk Quotes, Thoughts and Images

I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.

Evolution favors the survival of the wisest.

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

Find the right questions. You don't invent the answers, you reveal the answers.

Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process.

Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do.

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.

There is no such thing as failure, there's just giving up too soon.

The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?'

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born.

The art of science is as important as so-called technical science. You need both. It's this combination that must be recognized and acknowledged and valued.

When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine, you don't sleep well for two or three months.

My job is to help people see what I see. If it's of value, fine. And, if it's not of value, then at least I've done what I can do.

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

A good parent gives their child roots and wings.

I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.

My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience.

Are we being good ancestors?

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.

It is courage based on confidence, not daring, and it is confidence based on experience.

Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

A wisdom deficit - fewer elders and even fewer people who listen to them.

It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling.

It is said to await certainty is to await eternity.

The mind, in addition to medicine, has powers to turn the immune system around.

If all insects disappeared, all life on earth would perish. If all humans disappeared, all life on earth would flourish.

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.

Your dreams tell you what to do; your reason tells you how to do it.