Edward Teller Quotes

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.

Secrecy in science does not work. Withholding information does more damage to us than to our competitors.

There's no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to EMOTIONALLY comprehend the exponential function.

Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.

No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

I think that intellectuals who end up in hell will have to read page proofs and check indexes there.

Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb, there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian. I have no regrets.

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness.

In the theater you create a moment, but in that moment, there is a touch, a twinkle of eternity. And not just eternity, but community. . . . That connection is a sense of life for me.

I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in.

I believe in good. It is an ephemeral and elusive quality. It is the center of my beliefs, but it cannot be strengthened by talking about it.

I believe in excellence. It is a basic need of every human soul. All of us can be excellent, because, fortunately, we are exceedingly diverse in our ambitions and talents.

When Columbus took off, the purpose was to improve trade relations with China. That problem has not been solved to this very day, but just look at the by-products.

There is a time for scientists and movie stars and those who have flown the atlantic to restrain their opinions lest they be taken more seriously than they should be.

Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction.

U.S. has lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.

Really exotic methods of propulsion . . . will have to be devised to get there. How it will be done, I do not know. Whether it will be done, I am not quite certain. But I would bet it can be done.

I am guilty of the great crime of optimism.

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool.

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

My experience has been in a short 77 years that in the end when you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win.

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous.

No, I'm the infamous Edward Teller.

In our educational institutions applied science may almost be described as a "no-man's land."

Physics without mathematics is meaningless.

One may say that predictions are dangerous particularly for the future. If the danger involved in a prediction is not incurred, no consequence follows and the uncertainty principle is not violated.

Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.

There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge - especially if the knowledge is terrible.

Society's emissions of carbon dioxide may or may not turn out to have something significant to do with global warming-the jury is still out.

[Chemistry] laboratory work was my first challenge. ... I still carry the scars of my first discovery-that test-tubes are fragile.

Two paradoxes are better than one they may even suggest a solution.

A state-of-the-art calculation requires 100 hours of CPU time on the state-of-the-art computer, independent of the decade.

If anyone wants a hole in the ground, nuclear explosives can make big holes

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

Could we have avoided the tragedy of Hiroshima? Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands? No one knows. No one can find out.

If not for me, the H-bomb would have been developed in Russia first. In the U.S., we'd now be speaking Russian.

The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses.

Most people avoid thinking if they can, some of us are addicted to thinking, but Von Neumann actually enjoyed thinking, maybe even to the exclusion of everything else.