Top 40 Linus Pauling Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Optimum nutrition is the medicine of tomorrow.”

— Linus Pauling

Featured in: Medicine Quotes

2. “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”

— Linus Pauling

3. “You can trace every sickness, every disease and every ailment to a mineral deficiency.”

— Linus Pauling

4. “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.”

— Linus Pauling

5. “Do not let either the medical authorities or the politicians mislead you. Find out what the facts are, and make your own decisions about how to live a happy life and how to work for a better world.”

— Linus Pauling

6. “Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City.”

— Linus Pauling

7. “Provided one has the correct level of vitamin, mineral and nutritional input, the body can overcome disease.”

— Linus Pauling

8. “Every aspect of the world today – even politics and international relations – is affected by chemistry.”

— Linus Pauling

9. “There is no safe amount of radiation. Even small amounts do harm.”

— Linus Pauling

10. “Everyone should know that the ‘war on cancer’ is largely a fraud.”

— Linus Pauling

11. “Science is the search for truth – it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.”

— Linus Pauling

12. “Science is the search for truth.”

— Linus Pauling

13. “Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.”

— Linus Pauling

14. “If you take a reasonable amount of vitamin C regularly, the incidence of the common cold goes down. If you get a cold and start immediately, as soon as you start sneezing and sniffling, the cold just doesn’t get going.”

— Linus Pauling

15. “Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any molecule.”

— Linus Pauling

16. “Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.”

— Linus Pauling

17. “The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war.”

— Linus Pauling

18. “No evidence compels the conclusion that the minimum required intake of any vitamin comes close to the optimum intake that sustains good health.”

— Linus Pauling

19. “Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality.”

— Linus Pauling

20. “Man’s great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.”

— Linus Pauling

21. “I believe that you can, by taking some simple and inexpensive measures, extend your life and your years of well-being. My most important recommendation is that you take vitamins every day in optimun amounts, to supplement the vitamins you receive in your food.”

— Linus Pauling

22. “I hear from patients who say their doctor said, ‘If you want to take Vitamin C, go ahead and do it. It won’t harm you, and it may do you some good.’ More and more physicians are getting convinced about the value of large doses of Vitamin C.”

— Linus Pauling

23. “In teaching, you do not want to COVER things, you want to UNCOVER them. The best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas.”

— Linus Pauling

24. “Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organizations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.”

— Linus Pauling

25. “By the proper intakes of vitamins and other nutrients and by following a few other healthful practices from youth or middle age on, you can, I believe, extend your life and years of well-being by twenty-five or even thirty-five years.”

— Linus Pauling

26. “Although physicians, as part of their training, are taught that the dosage of a drug that is prescribed for the patient must be very carefully determined and controlled, they seem to have difficulty in remembering that the same principle applies to the vitamins.”

— Linus Pauling

27. “I believe that there is a greater power in the world than the evil power of military force, of nuclear bombs – there is the power of good, of morality, of humanitarianism.”

— Linus Pauling

28. “The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used-we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immmorality.”

— Linus Pauling

29. “I think every person should be able to enjoy life. Try to decide what you most enjoy doing, and then look around to see if there is a job for which you could prepare yourself that would enable you to continue having this sort of joy.”

— Linus Pauling

30. “There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed.”

— Linus Pauling

31. “Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress for the benefit of all.”

— Linus Pauling

32. “Men will gather knowledge no matter what the consequences. Science will go on whether we are pessimistic or optimistic, as I am. More interesting discoveries than we can imagine will be made, and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.”

— Linus Pauling

33. “I believe all complicated phenomena can be explained by simpler scientific principles.”

— Linus Pauling

34. “I have always wanted to know as much as possible about the world.”

— Linus Pauling

35. “Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.”

— Linus Pauling

36. “Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.”

— Linus Pauling

37. “The problem of an atomic war must not be confused by minor problems such as Communism versus capitalism. An atomic war would kill everyone, left, right, or center.”

— Linus Pauling

38. “I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.”

— Linus Pauling

39. “Nations keep agreements, keep their treaties so long as they continue to do them good.”

— Linus Pauling

40. “Like thousands of other boys, I had a little chemical laboratory in our cellar and think that some of our friends thought me a bit crazy.”

— Linus Pauling

41. “But I know also that still more interesting discoveries will be made that I have not the imagination to describe – and I am awaiting them, full of curiosity and enthusiasm.”

— Linus Pauling

42. “We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same mechanism used in producing these striking structures that are crystals.”

— Linus Pauling

43. “I made use of the college library by borrowing books other than scientific books, such as all of the plays by George Bernard Shaw, the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The college library helped me to develop a broader aspect on life.”

— Linus Pauling

44. “It will be possible, through the detailed determination of amino-acid sequences of hemoglobin molecules and of other molecules too, to obtain much information about the course of the evolutionary process, and to illuminate the question of the origin of species.”

— Linus Pauling

45. “If a doctor isn’t ‘up’ on something, he’s ‘down’ on it.”

— Linus Pauling