Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.
Evolution favors the survival of the wisest.
A wisdom deficit – fewer elders and even fewer people who listen to them.
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.
I have the impression that the new generation of young people, are coming up on the scene with a sense “ancestorhood”, and with more wisdom than was evident before.
I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience.
My life is pretty well at peace, and the profession is more of an avocation. It’s a calling, if you like, rather than a job. I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would.
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.
What you see in living systems, and in genetic systems, is that the genes are already there, having arisen in the course of time, and when they are needed they become activated. If they had to be invented, the time would be too late.
Wisdom: It’s something that you know when you see it. You can recognize it, you can experience it. I have defined wisdom as the capacity to make judgments that when looked back upon will seem to have been wise.
I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution; because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time.
A good parent gives their child roots and wings.
I have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing at the time, but as something I can guide by the choices I make.
I’m saying that we should trust our intuition. I believe that the principles of universal evolution are revealed to us through intuition. And I think that if we combine our intuition and our reason, we can respond in an evolutionary sound way to our problems.
Nothing happens quite by chance. It’s a question of accretion of information and experience.
Are we being good ancestors?
It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling.
Life is an error-making and an error-correctin g process, and nature in marking man’s papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive.
I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?
There is no patent. Could you patent the Sun?
Parte de la gran inquietud y de los trastornos del mundo actual se deben no tanto al cambio mismo como al paso acelerado en que se produce el cambio.