Science Quote by George Wald

Desire, in Wald's framing, isn't a hopeful engine; it's a boomerang. The line lands because it inverts the usual moral about wanting too much: the problem isn't frustration, it's fulfillment. Coming from a scientist who lived through the century of industrial-scale “progress,” it reads less like a fortune-cookie paradox and more like a laboratory observation about unintended consequences.

Wald’s intent is prophylactic: a warning aimed at appetites that dress themselves up as needs. The subtext is that wanting is not neutral. A society can be technically brilliant and emotionally adolescent, mistaking acquisition for wisdom. When people get what they want at scale - cheap energy, frictionless convenience, endless growth - the costs don’t arrive as a bill labeled “regret.” They arrive as cancer clusters, poisoned rivers, climate volatility, hollowed-out communities, and politics warped by consumption.

The sentence works because it’s built like a trap. “Most of the things” is doing quiet work, conceding that some wants are worthy while refusing to let us hide behind that exception. “People” universalizes culpability, but without sanctimony; it’s an epidemiological “we.” Then the punch: “they get them.” Not “they chase them,” not “they deserve them.” They get them. Success, the culture’s default happy ending, becomes the mechanism of harm.

In context, it’s a scientist’s version of irony: the more capable we become of satisfying desire, the more urgent the question of what desire is for - and who pays when it’s answered.