I want to initiate a change in society in the long term.
The world in which we live is the only world about which our senses can testify.
Science, in the very act of solving problems, creates more of them.
Medical education is not just a program for building knowledge and skills in its recipients. . . it is also an experience which creates attitudes and expectations.
Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the most outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. . . Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity, and the less they are deflected by the consideration of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare, but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest, which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.
Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. . . no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
A patient had a 50-50 chance of benefiting from visiting a physician as of 1910. Medicine was more like voodoo than science until the 20th Century.
A hermit is one who renounces the world of fragments that he may enjoy the world wholly and without interruption.
The trouble with always leaving yourself a way out is that you always take it.
No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.
No one's perfect," I whisper. "It doesn't work that way. One bad thing goes away, and another bad thing replaces it. " I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.