Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.
When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine, you don’t sleep well for two or three months.
The mind, in addition to medicine, has powers to turn the immune system around.
There is no such thing as failure, there’s just giving up too soon.
As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that. That’s what motivates me.
It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It’s my partner.
This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man – if man is not enslaved by it.
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.
Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.
What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.
Find the right questions. You don’t invent the answers, you reveal the answers.
I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.
It is courage based on confidence, not daring, and it is confidence based on experience.
I couldn’t possibly have become a member of this Institute, you know, if I hadn’t organized it myself.
I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.
There is a moment of conception and a moment of birth, but between them there is a long period of gestation.
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.
In my view, art and the approach to life through art, using it as a vehicle for education and even for doing science is so vital that it is part of a great new revolution that is taking place. I believe we are entering a whole new epoch.
The worst tragedy that could have befallen me was my success. I knew right away that I was through – cast out.