Joshua Lederberg Quotes

“I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“All of civility depends on being able to contain the rage of individuals.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I wish I had a talent for dropping things as well as taking on new ones. It gets to be quite a clutter after a while.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I get curious about new things. My real strength is going into a field that has not been investigated before, and finding new approaches to it.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“Being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try out other things.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I believe I am a person with unusual talents. I think I'd be a liar or stupid if I were to deny that.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.”

— Joshua Lederberg

I have many shortcomings. I feel very lucky to have been able to have what I've had.

— Joshua Lederberg

I think we have to believe we are here for some purpose, and I know there are many cynics who will deny it, but they don't live as if they deny it.

— Joshua Lederberg

“I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.”

— Joshua Lederberg

I certainly saw science as a kind of calling, and one with as much legitimacy as a religious calling.

— Joshua Lederberg

“I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I hope I've lived a life of science whose style will encourage younger people.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“If it takes you 20 or 25 years to establish yourself in one field, you really ought to be careful not to stray too far.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“To have the recognition of your colleagues is great. The public attention is a mixed blessing.”

— Joshua Lederberg

Try hard to find out what you're good at and what your passions are, and where the two converge, and build your life around that.

— Joshua Lederberg

“We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects.”

— Joshua Lederberg

If we have isolated individuals able to inflict enormous harm, imagine what a single lunatic can do with a nuclear weapon. I think the whole base of civil society is at risk.

— Joshua Lederberg

“If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I'm chairing a UNESCO committee on how to improve global Internet communications for science; help third-world people get onto the Net so they can be part of the process.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“Although I am a public figure, I'm still a little shy. I don't think my own personality is important. I prefer to keep some small dosage of privacy.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“If lifespan jumps by 30 or 40 years, that has enormous implications.”

— Joshua Lederberg

A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.

— Joshua Lederberg

As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.

— Joshua Lederberg

“Everybody has to learn for the first time.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.”

— Joshua Lederberg

The single biggest threat to man's continued dominance on the planet is the virus.

— Joshua Lederberg

“The central moral issue of science is that we do not have a science of peace and hardly know where to begin in building one.”

— Joshua Lederberg

“I was a bad practicing physician because I was never sure of the diagnosis or of the treatment.”

— Joshua Lederberg