J Salk Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Jonas Salk

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. — Jonas Salk

What makes your heart leap? — Jonas Salk

Being natural and matter-of-fact about nudity prevents your children from developing an attitude of shame or disgust about the human body. If parents are very secretive about their bodies and go to great lengths to prevent their children from ever seeing a buttock or breast, children will wonder what is so unusual, and even alarming, about human nudity. — Lee Salk

Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don't recognize the pattern and the significance. It's the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It's a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it's positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It's like a journey. It's like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else. — Jonas Salk

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

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes. Before Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio that finally worked, he tried two hundred unsuccessful ones. Somebody asked him, "How did it feel to fail two hundred times?" "I never failed two hundred times in my life," Salk replied. "I was taught not to use the word 'failure.' I just discovered two hundred ways how not to vaccinate for polio. — John Ortberg Jr.

When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm ... the realm of the imagination guides my thinking. — Jonas Salk

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

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more. — Jonas Salk

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

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

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

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. — Jonas Salk

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

We were told in one lecture that it was possible to immunize against diphtheria and tetanus by the use of chemically treated toxins, or toxoids. And the following lecture, we were told that
for immunization against a virus disease, you have to experience the infection, and that you could not induce immunity with the so-called "killed" or inactivated, chemically treated virus preparation. Well, somehow, that struck me. What struck me was that both statements couldn't be true. And I asked why this was so, and the answer that was given was in a sense, 'Because.'
There was no satisfactory answer. — Jonas Salk

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. — Jonas Salk

What is ... important is that we - number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. — Jonas Salk

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. — Jonas Salk

In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity. — Paul Farmer

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. — Jonas Salk

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. — Jonas Salk

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

problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand at least partially paralyzed. Soon afterward, vaccines developed by Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and a virologist named Hilary Koprowski (about whose controversial career, more later) came into wide use, eventually eliminating poliomyelitis throughout most of the world. In 1988, WHO and several partner institutions — David Quammen

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. — Jonas Salk

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

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

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

I couldn't possibly have become a member of this Institute, you know, if I hadn't organized it myself. — Jonas Salk