Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread

School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.

Up to a certain point anxiety is good, for it promotes action. Beyond that point we freeze any fixed attitudes or rush about without thinking deeply from one decision to another.

A competitive culture endures by tearing people down.

Most of the doctors in the Tunisian administration, especially those in country districts, contracted typhus and approximately one third of them died of it

My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today

I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals

Happiness does not come from a job. It comes from knowing what you truly value, and behaving in a way that’s consistent with those beliefs.

Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

Remember that there's no one way of doing things. ... If you just get a hammer and hit it really hard, whatever it is, I guarantee you it'll open.

This, then, is the test we must set for ourselves; not to march alone but to march in such a way that others will wish to join us.

I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.

When I go to the line I'm thinking 'All net.' When I don't think that, I'm likely to miss.

I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it.

The French don't know how to cook breakfast.