Remember the Three Princes of Serendip who went out looking for treasure? They didn’t find what they were looking for, but they kept finding things just as valuable. That’s serendipity, and our business [drugs] is full of it.

I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations.

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.

I must say, I spend a lot of my time these days trying to persuade people that controlled trials are the only way to get information that’s reliable about drugs.

Advances in drug development have led to greater improvement in the quality of human life than advances in all other fields combined.

It is easy to get a thousand prescriptions, but hard to get one single remedy.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

If you think compliance is expensive, try non-compliance.

The cures we want aren’t going to fall from the sky. We have to get ladders and climb up and get them.

The greatest joy in life is to accomplish. It is the getting, not the having. It is the giving, not the keeping.

Good information is the best medicine.

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.

I trust I may be enabled in the treatment of patients always to act with a single eye to their good.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

There is so much more to be done; the patients are waiting.

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.

I have no ideology. My ideology is health.

Without drugs, physicians would struggle to find relevance, and patients would suffer without hope.

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.

Drugs don’t work in patients who don’t take them.