Glenn T. Seaborg Quotes

There are young people today who feel that we shouldn’t have developed the atomic bomb, that it was a mistake. Through no fault of their own, they don’t have this sense of history. They didn’t live through this most terrifying period when we thought we were losing the race with Adolf Hitler.

People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding.

I believe that one of the characteristics of the human race, possibly the one that is primarily responsible for its course of evolution, is that it has grown by creatively responding to failure.

The education of young people in science is at least as important, maybe more so, than the research itself.

One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.