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A Quote by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi de Nagyrapolt on facts, future, interest, investment, life, losing, mankind, military, money, necessity, needs, people, problems, purpose, simplicity, solution, soul, stability, universe, war, wishes, and world

Our nervous system developed for one sole purpose, to maintain our lives and satisfy our needs. All our reflexes serve this purpose. this makes us utterly egotistic. With rare exceptions people are really interested in one thing only: themselves. Everybody, by necessity, is the center of his own universe. When the human brain took its final shape, say, 100,000 years ago, problems and solutions must have been exceedingly simple. There were no long-range problems and man had to grab any immediate advantage. The world has changed but we are still willing to sell more distant vital interests for some minor immediate gains. Our military industrial complex, which endangers the future of mankind, to a great extent owes its stability to the fact that so may people depend on it for their living. This holds true for all of us, including myself. When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893 - 1986)
Source: Albert Szent-Györgyi, The Crazy Ape, Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 1971, p 72.
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