Top 50 Jonas Salk Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.”

— Jonas Salk

2. “Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what’s been taught them.”

— Jonas Salk

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3. “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”

— Jonas Salk

4. “Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process.”

— Jonas Salk

5. “There is no such thing as failure, there’s just giving up too soon.”

— Jonas Salk

6. “Solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don’t invent the answer-you reveal the answer.”

— Jonas Salk

7. “Evolution favors the survival of the wisest.”

— Jonas Salk

8. “Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.”

— Jonas Salk

9. “Eventually we’ll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.”

— Jonas Salk

10. “I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.”

— Jonas Salk

Featured in: Fitness Quotes

11. “What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.”

— Jonas Salk

12. “I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.”

— Jonas Salk

13. “Find the right questions. You don’t invent the answers, you reveal the answers.”

— Jonas Salk

14. “Are we being good ancestors?”

— Jonas Salk

15. “Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do.”

— Jonas Salk

16. “Nothing happens quite by chance. It’s a question of accretion of information and experience.”

— Jonas Salk

17. “I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution; because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time.”

— Jonas Salk

18. “Life is an error-making and an error-correctin g process, and nature in marking man’s papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive.”

— Jonas Salk

19. “I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.”

— Jonas Salk

20. “The mind, in addition to medicine, has powers to turn the immune system around.”

— Jonas Salk

21. “There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.”

— Jonas Salk

22. “The art of science is as important as so-called technical science. You need both. It’s this combination that must be recognized and acknowledged and valued.”

— Jonas Salk

23. “Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.”

— Jonas Salk

24. “It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It’s my partner.”

— Jonas Salk

25. “If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of evolution, consciously as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age could be born.”

— Jonas Salk

26. “I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.”

— Jonas Salk

27. “When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine, you don’t sleep well for two or three months.”

— Jonas Salk

28. “Your dreams tell you what to do; your reason tells you how to do it.”

— Jonas Salk

29. “I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?”

— Jonas Salk

30. “This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man – if man is not enslaved by it.”

— Jonas Salk

31. “A good parent gives their child roots and wings.”

— Jonas Salk

32. “As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that. That’s what motivates me.”

— Jonas Salk

33. “It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling.”

— Jonas Salk

34. “The worst tragedy that could have befallen me was my success. I knew right away that I was through – cast out.”

— Jonas Salk

35. “My life is pretty well at peace, and the profession is more of an avocation. It’s a calling, if you like, rather than a job. I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would.”

— Jonas Salk

36. “I’m saying that we should trust our intuition. I believe that the principles of universal evolution are revealed to us through intuition. And I think that if we combine our intuition and our reason, we can respond in an evolutionary sound way to our problems.”

— Jonas Salk

37. “I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience.”

— Jonas Salk

38. “Wisdom: It’s something that you know when you see it. You can recognize it, you can experience it. I have defined wisdom as the capacity to make judgments that when looked back upon will seem to have been wise.”

— Jonas Salk

39. “What you see in living systems, and in genetic systems, is that the genes are already there, having arisen in the course of time, and when they are needed they become activated. If they had to be invented, the time would be too late.”

— Jonas Salk

40. “My job is to help people see what I see. If it’s of value, fine. And, if it’s not of value, then at least I’ve done what I can do.”

— Jonas Salk

41. “I have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing at the time, but as something I can guide by the choices I make.”

— Jonas Salk

42. “I couldn’t possibly have become a member of this Institute, you know, if I hadn’t organized it myself.”

— Jonas Salk

43. “The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’”

— Jonas Salk

44. “It is courage based on confidence, not daring, and it is confidence based on experience.”

— Jonas Salk

45. “My ambition was to bring to bear on medicine a chemical approach. I did that by chemical manipulation of viruses and chemical ways of thinking in biomedical research.”

— Jonas Salk

46. “There is a moment of conception and a moment of birth, but between them there is a long period of gestation.”

— Jonas Salk

47. “A wisdom deficit – fewer elders and even fewer people who listen to them.”

— Jonas Salk

48. “I have the impression that the new generation of young people, are coming up on the scene with a sense “ancestorhood”, and with more wisdom than was evident before.”

— Jonas Salk

49. “Charlotte’s Web Life is magic, the way nature works seems to be quite magical.”

— Jonas Salk

50. “In my view, art and the approach to life through art, using it as a vehicle for education and even for doing science is so vital that it is part of a great new revolution that is taking place. I believe we are entering a whole new epoch.”

— Jonas Salk