Joseph Murray's Quotes

At heart, I'm a reconstructive surgeon.

Blanket objection is not very reasonable to me - any effort to control scientific advances is doomed to fail.

I still have a vivid memory of my excitement when I first saw a chart of the periodic table of elements. The order in the universe seemed miraculous.

I wanted to be a surgeon, possibly influenced by the qualities of our family doctor who cared for our childhood ailments.

If you're going to worry about what people say, you're never going to make any progress.

It's the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a few years ago.

Kidney transplants seem so routine now. But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean.

Service to society is the rent we pay for living on this planet.

Stem cells are probably going to be extremely useful.

The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?

Work is a prayer. And I start off every morning dedicating it to our Creator.

You cannot stop the human mind from working.

My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the 'National Geographic.'

Post-operatively the transplanted kidney functioned immediately with a dramatic improvement in the patient's renal and cardiopulmonary status. This spectacular success was a clear demonstration that organ transplantation could be life-saving.

Having said that, I enjoyed every minute of my time and I got a degree of job satisfaction which I am sure was far greater than the majority of my colleagues.

For in the works of Robert Burns we see the whole cosmos of man's experience and emotion, from zenith to nadir, from birth until death.

If anyone ever asked me what I had to complain about it would not have taken long to tell them. Maybe I was just easily pleased.

If I was starting off now, I would probably have taken one or two different turnings along the way.

One cannot imagine Scots music and song without the contribution of Burns.

The option of solicitor advocacy came on the scene a bit too late for me.

And on 25 January of each year and for many days before it and after it there is not an hour in the day or night when a Burns Supper is not taking place somewhere on this earth.

And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.

Besides, I always thought that one of the great attractions of practising law was what I like to call the collegiality of the profession and I think that duty of collegiality applies even when we are retired.

I think that practising the law, particularly litigation, and particularly in Glasgow, has always been difficult enough without adding to it by having problems with professional colleagues or former colleagues.

There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide.

There does not seem to be that collegiality I referred to, there seems to be much more of a them versus us attitude, rather than we all have a role to play in this process so let's get on with it.