Albert Einstein Quotes

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Albert Einstein

“[Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Nazism:]

Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of Charles Darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. Darwin’s thought was not taught in Germany; Darwinism was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime.

Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms – the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome – if it’s an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of Mein Kampf, that Hitler says that he’s doing God’s work and executing God’s will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making Hitler into a minor god, begins, “I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come that the first treaty made by the Nationalist Socialist dictatorship, the very first is with the Vatican? It’s exchanging political control of Germany for Catholic control of German education. How come that the church has celebrated the birthday of the Fuhrer every year, on that day until democracy put an end to this filthy, quasi-religious, superstitious, barbarous, reactionary system?

Again, this is not a difference of emphasis between us. To suggest that there’s something fascistic about me and about my beliefs is something I won't hear said and you shouldn't believe.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.”
― Albert Einstein

“Student is not a container you have to fill but a torch you have to light up.”
― Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions

“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.”
― Albert Einstein

“Weak people revenge. Strong people forgive. Intelligent people ignore.”
― Albert Einstein

“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”
― Albert Einstein

“Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong."

~Albert Einstein

"Einstein is referring to ones 'legacy' and its intended future recipients as being willfully purposed to benefit them on their journey through this gift of life given to us by God”
― R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is the Destination: A Book of Quotes With Commentaries

“If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Why should I have to hide the fact that I don't believe there’s a supreme being? There’s no proof of it. There’s no harm in saying you’re an atheist. It doesn't mean you treat people any differently. I live by the Golden Rule to do unto others, as you'd want to be treated.

I just simply don't believe in religion, and I don’t believe necessarily that there’s a supreme being that watches over all of us. I follow the teachings of George Carlin. George said he worshipped the sun. He was a fellow atheist. I’m in good company … Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Charles Darwin. It’s not like I’m not with good company and intelligent people. There have been some good, intelligent atheists who have lived in the world.”
― Jesse Ventura

“Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.”
― Albert Einstein

“The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.”
― Max Planck, Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science

“Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him.”
― Wolfgang Pauli

“On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been speakers and writers who embody Einstein's injunction to 'remember your humanity and forget the rest.' It would be immodest to claim membership in this fraternity/sorority, but I hope not to have done anything to outrage it. Despite the idiotic sneer that such principles are 'fashionable,' it is always the ideas of secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity that stand in need of reaffirmation.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn’t a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“My dad said to me a few years ago: "There's no harm in thinking." We were talking about Crazy Uncle Albert and whether it was right to use your brain to build weapons.

He said, "You can't expect people not to think. Not to know things just because they COULD be bad."

I said, "Yeah, but then they built it and a hundred thousand people died."

My dad laughed and said there were a lot of steps between the thinking and the doing.

Which I know, duh. All I was saying is that when you think of doing something, you don't always know the consequences. For a while people THOUGHT about building the bomb, but nothing happened. In the end it was a lot of different people doing a lot of different things, most of which had nothing to do with the bomb, that did make it happen.

I think about that sometimes. Who was the person who had the first thought, the one that started it all?

And after they had the thought, what was the first thing they did?

I know my uncle never thought, Hey, all this great science- one day I'll use it to kill a whole bunch of people. You just look at his picture; he's not that kind of person.

And yet, I guess in a way he sort of is.”
― Mariah Fredericks, Head Games

“After long reflection in solitude and meditation, I suddenly had the idea, during the year 1923, that the discovery made by Einstein in 1905 should be generalised by extending it to all material particles and notably to electrons.”
― Louis de Broglie

“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
― Albert Einstein

“If it were Hegel, I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“Well, this is basically the end, so the answers should be in these next few pages. I doubt they will surprise you, but you never know. I don't know how smart or thick you are. You could be Albert Einstein for all I know, or some literary prizewinner, or maybe you're just middle of the road like me.”
― Markus Zusak, Underdog

“Much later, when I discussed the problem with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. But this 'blunder,' rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant denoted by the Greek letter Λ rears its ugly head again and again and again.”
― George Gamow

“THE ONLY THING YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO KNOW
IS THE LOCATION OF THE LIBRARY.
—Albert Einstein”
― Rebecca Stead

“It almost seems to me that man was not born to be a carnivore.”
― Albert Einstein

“I knew I had become a successful author of quotes when my thoughts started appearing alongside those of Mark Twain, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, Confucius, Buddha, and so many other notable people in history.”
― Steven Magee

“Albert Einstein would have been funnier had he been photographed wearing a tee-shirt that said ‘Porn Star’!”
― Steven Magee

“A ciência sem a religião é manca, a religião sem a ciência é cega", atribuída a Albert Einstein
sem a base da razão e da evidência, a religião corre o risco de se tornar dogmática e inflexível, potencialmente levando a conflitos e divisões.”
― Jorge Guerra Pires, Ciência para não cientistas: como ser mais racional em um mundo cada vez mais irracional (Vol. II: Religião) (Inteligência Artificial, Democracia, e Pensamento Crítico)

“Baruch Spinoza, um filósofo holandês do século XVII, apresentou uma visão revolucionária de Deus que continua a influenciar o pensamento filosófico e científico até hoje. Em sua obra "Ética", Spinoza descreve Deus não como uma entidade antropomórfica ou transcendente, mas como a única substância infinita, composta por infinitos atributos, que constitui a realidade do universo.”
― Jorge Guerra Pires, Ciência para não cientistas: como ser mais racional em um mundo cada vez mais irracional (Vol. II: Religião) (Inteligência Artificial, Democracia, e Pensamento Crítico)

“Também fica evidente que a bíblia não deveria ser lida sem um arsenal teórica grande, teologia avançada. Religiosos não deveria ignorar, como exemplo, os achados de Newton, que foi nada. Apesar de Newton ter conseguido decifrar os segredos do universo, ele falhou em decifrar os escritos da Deus. Outros cientistas, igualmente grandes, ignoraram completamente a existência de Deus, como Hawking, outros como Einstein aceitaram Deus, mas rejeitaram a ideia de um Deus fofoqueiro, que se preocupa onde fica o ponto G do homem ou da mulher.”
― Jorge Guerra Pires, Ciência para não cientistas: como ser mais racional em um mundo cada vez mais irracional (Vol. II: Religião) (Inteligência Artificial, Democracia, e Pensamento Crítico)