"What, more petitions! Won't you be, and stay, intimidated? You must really annoy Sen. Dodd. Here it is [my signature], and I hope it does some good."

Edward Condon. Letter to Linus and Ava Helen Pauling. January 17, 1961.

"We think of this honor as an indication of the rightness of our position during these many years. You know, of course, my husband would have preferred to have remained quietly in his laboratory thinking about his scientific problems. However, people are more important that scientific truths."

Ava Helen Pauling. Letter to Victoria Orellana. 1963.

"I suppose that I am responsible to some degree for Linus’s deciding to put so much of his effort into peace activities. In talking with him, I said I thought that it was of course important that he do his scientific work. But if the world were destroyed, then that work would not be of any value -- so he should take part of his time and devote it to peace work."

Ava Helen Pauling. NOVA Interview. June 1977.

"Ava Helen had been interested in social, political and economic problems ever since she was a teenage girl. She used to argue with a friend of the family, one of the judges of the Oregon State Supreme Court. She had a general interest in science and was very able, very smart, but she was really concerned about human beings. The humanistic concern she had was very great. I'm sure that if I had not married her, I would not have had this aspect of my career -- working for world peace."

Linus Pauling. NOVA Interview. June 1977.

"When that program came to an end, Spivak took off down the hall, running as fast as he could go, with my wife after him, waving her fists. I guess she had a hard time restraining herself during the program. But he managed to escape."

Linus Pauling. Oral history interview conducted by John L. Greenberg, California Institute of Technology Archives. May 1984.

"The McCarthy period came along...and many of the other scientists who had been working on these same lines gave up. Probably saying ‘Why should I sacrifice myself? I am a scientist, I am supposed to be working on scientific things, so I don’t need to put myself at risk by talking about these possibilities.’ And I have said that perhaps I’m just stubborn... I don’t like anybody to tell me what to do or to think, except Mrs. Pauling."

Linus Pauling. Interview with Wayne Reynolds, American Academy of Achievement. November 11, 1990.

"In the summer of 1953, he and my mother said, 'come meet us in Athens.' So I went to the hotel -- they weren't there. There were storms on the North Atlantic and I thought the plane had been delayed, and it finally occurred to me that they were never going to show up. What had happened, of course, is that Ruth Shipley, who ran the passport department, entirely at her own whim had refused him a passport."

Peter Pauling. Lifestory: Linus Pauling, produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. 1997.

"There was a thing called the Hollywood Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, and I went with the parents to a rally in some football stadium, ten thousand people, not a very big one. I sat next to Katharine Hepburn."

Peter Pauling. Lifestory: Linus Pauling, produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. 1997.