I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.

A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

The concept of war crimes is an American invention.

The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful.

There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.

When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy.

Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.