Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
The Impossible Takes Longer (16 page)
904. My advice to anybody wanting to be a physician is to love people and like taking care of them.
Joseph Murray
MEDICINE, 1990
905. We're losing time now because we're not spending enough money to do research. As a consequence of not acting, we are sentencing people to death when we could help them be treated with new drugs.
Craig C. Mello
MEDICINE, 2006
906. Sometimes the best way to predict the doctor's diagnosis is to find out what has just been published in the
Journal
of the American Medical Association.
Herbert Simon
ECONOMICS, 1978
907. The microbe that felled one child in a distant continent yesterday can reach yours today and seed a global pandemic tomorrow.
Joshua Lederberg
MEDICINE, 1958
908. Hunger makes a thief of any man.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
909. The first essential component of social justice is adequate food.
Norman Borlaug
PEACE, 1970
910. You can't build peace on empty stomachs.
John BoydOrr
PEACE, 1949
911. The science of nutrition is a shambles.
Arthur Kornberg
MEDICINE, 1959
912. One thing I can guarantee: you'll get into trouble if you always eat nothing but French fries.
Richard Roberts
MEDICINE, 1993
913. Some people eat too much; some people eat too little. Nothing else about diet really matters.
Kary Mullis
CHEMISTRY, 1993
914. Yes, I am a vegetarian. I find the thought of stuffing fragments of corpses down my throat quite repulsive, and I am amazed that so many people do it every day.
J. M. Coetzee
LITERATURE, 2003
915. I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978
916. Almost all the food faddists I have ever known, nut-eaters and the like, have died young after a long period of senile decay.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
917. A man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.
William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949
918. Well, between Scotch and nothing, I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949
919. When I was a young subaltern in the South African War, the water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whisky. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
920. When I was younger I made it a rule never to take a strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
921. A man takes to drink, a drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
Sinclair Lewis
LITERATURE, 1930
922. The case for prohibiting drugs is exacdy as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do.
Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976
923. If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.
Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976
924. I have estimated statistically that the prohibition of drugs produces, on the average, ten thousand homicides a year. It's a moral problem that the government is going around killing ten thousand people.
Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976
925. If you want to lead a miserable life, all you need to do is start smoking cigarettes.
Linus Pauling
CHEMISTRY, 1954; PEACE, 1962
The two world wars of the twentieth century left their mark on a large number of the men and women who have won the Nobel Prize.
Considerable numbers of Nobel Prize winners served in the armed forces of the combatant nations in one or both world wars.
Anecdotes of their experiences are legion. James Franck, who won the Iron Cross twice in World War I, was famous for ordering his troops, "Come to attention—please!" James Chadwick was a graduate student in Berlin when war broke out in 1914, and passed the four years of war incarcerated in a horse stable. Louis-Victor de Broglie, a French prince, spent the First World War as a radio operator stationed in the Eiffel Tower. Heinrich Boll served on the Eastern Front and was wounded four times. Willy Brandt made daring covert missions from Norway into Germany during World War II. Val Fitch's undergraduate career was interrupted by military service in World War II. He was posted to Los Alamos, where his admiration for the physicists who worked there took him into a career in physics and to the Nobel Prize in 1980. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's service as a Soviet artillery officer in World War II was cut short when he made a derogatory comment about Stalin in a letter to a friend, for which he served eight years in the Gulag.
The moral ambiguities generated by war are well illustrated by the large number of Nobel laureates who worked in both wars
on the invention and improvement of weapons. The history of the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos and elsewhere reads like a roll call of Nobel laureates, including Niels Bohr, James Franck, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, Richard Feynman, and Hans Bethe. Werner Heisenberg headed the German atom bomb project, and Andrei Sakharov led the hydrogen bomb project in the USSR. Other Nobel Prize winners directly affected by the atomic bomb were Luis Alvarez, who as an official observer witnessed the Hiroshima explosion from a U.S.
bomber; Joseph Rotblat, who left the project after the defeat of Germany and founded the Pugwash disarmament conferences; and all the Japanese laureates, for whom Hiroshima and Nagasaki were highly traumatic events. Other laureates helped to develop radar. Fritz Haber pioneered the use of poison gas. The rationale seems to have been the same in all these cases of weapons development: to hasten the end of the war.
While some laureates developed weapons of war, others were its victims. Who knows how many future Nobel laureates perished in Nazi concentration camps? A few survived. Georges Charpak and Leon Jouhaux were imprisoned for their activities in the French Resistance. As a child, Roald Hoffmann was smuggled out of a Nazi labor camp by his father, who later died in a breakout attempt. Elie Wiesel was sixteen when he arrived in Auschwitz, where he lost both parents; he was liberated from Buchenwald ten months later. The Hungarian Literature laureate Imre Kertesz also survived these two camps.
War, the greatest of human evils, generates notoriety for its protagonists, but those who prevent wars from occurring frequently remain anonymous. History is blind to catastrophes that do not occur, and hence to many peacemakers. But every December, the award of the Peace Prize in Oslo makes that city the focus of human hopes for a more peaceful world.
Few people would have heard of the struggle for human rights in Burma but for the recognition of Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, or of that in East Timor without the award of the Peace Prize to Carlos Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta in 1996. Although the Peace Prize has been awarded to two generals, George C. Marshall and Yitzhak Rabin, and to Theodore Roosevelt, the most bellicose of all American presidents, nominees tend to be disqualified if they have advocated violence. Mahatma Gandhi, who had been previously nominated several times, was a front-runner for the prize in 1947, when the Nobel Committee received word that, in the midst of Hindu-Muslim conflict in India, he had renounced his previous opposition to war. This report was later shown to be incorrect, but as a consequence, the 1947 prize went to the Society of Friends, and by the following year Gandhi had been assassinated.
Five Nobel Peace laureates died as martyrs: Carl von Ossi-etzky perished as a result of brutal treatment in Nazi concentration camps. Dag Hammarskjold was killed in a plane crash while on a peace mission in the Congo. Martin Luther King, Anwar al-Sadat, and Yitzhak Rabin were all assassinated.
926. If the dead could speak, there would be no more war.
Heinrich Böll
LITERATURE, 1972
927. War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002
928. War almost invariably brings instant popularity to the President.
Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002
929. The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men . . . The world which goes to war is a world usually, genuinely desiring peace. War is the outcome, not mainly of evil intentions, but on the whole, of good intentions which miscarry or are frustrated. It is made, not usually by evil men knowing themselves to be wrong, but is the outcome of policies pursued by good men usually passionately convinced that they are right.
Norman Angell
PEACE, 1933
930. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.
Ralph Bunche
PEACE, 1950
931. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war ever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
932. I know war as it is, not through reading about it . . . Supporters of peace have a duty and a task. It is to point out, over and over again, there is nothing heroic in war but that it brings terror and misery to mankind.
Carl von Ossietzky
PEACE, 1935
933. Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.
Yitzhak Rabin
PEACE, 1994
934.1 find war detestable but even more detestable are those who praise war without participating in it.
Romain Rolland
LITERATURE, 1915
935. When the rich make war, it's the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre
LITERATURE, 1964
936. Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
937. It is impossible to defend ourselves unless on occasion we are prepared to defend others.
Norman Angell
PEACE, 1933
938. A sword is needed to conquer a sword.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
939. Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.
Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002
940. Moral of the Work. In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance.
In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
941. I have always urged fighting wars and other contentions with might and main till overwhelming victory, and then offering the hand of friendship to the vanquished. Thus I have always been against the Pacifists during the quarrel, and against the Jingoes at its close.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
942. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
943. This was a time when it was equally good to live or die.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
944. We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
945. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
946.1 shall never forget the afternoon of that Christmas Eve. At first there were only a few among us and the English who looked over the parapet of the trenches, which were about fifty metres apart. Then there were more and more, and before long all the soldiers came out of the trenches. We fraternized. The English gave us their good cigarettes, and those among us who had candied fruit gave them some. We sang songs together, and for the night of 24/25 December the war stopped.
OttoHahn
CHEMISTRY, 1944
Of the 1914 Christmas Truce
947. Don't hit at all if you can help it; don't hit a man if you can possibly avoid it; but if you do hit him, put him to sleep.
Theodore Roosevelt
PEACE, 1906
948. Of all its inventions, there is none which the human race has gone to greater lengths to perfect than its means of mass destruction of its fellow men.
Henri Dunant
PEACE, 1901
949. The distinction between offensive and defensive arms was a very simple one. If you were in front of them, they were offensive; if you were behind them, they were defensive.
Lester Pearson
PEACE, 1957
950. If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
George Porter
CHEMISTRY, 1967
951. Peaceful conditions in the world are not welcome to the arms industry.
Seán MacBride
PEACE, 1974
952. No civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.
Mohamed ElBaradei
PEACE, 2005
953. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
Henry Kissinger
PEACE, 1973
954. The spiritual life of the soldier is more important than his physical equipment.
George C. Marshall
PEACE, 1953
955. Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration . . . This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs.
