Einstein Quotes

The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.

I like neither new clothes nor new kinds of food.

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition.

My comprehension of God comes from a deeply felt conviction of a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

Violence sometimes may have cleared away obstructions quickly, but it never has proved itself creative.

A tyranny based on ... deception and maintained by terror must inevitably perish from the poison it generates within itself.

Great spirits often meet violent oppisition with mediocre minds.

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.

The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest.

The illusion that we are separate from one another is an optical delusion of our consciousness.

Imagination Is More Powerful Than Knowledge Because Knowledhe Is Limited But Imagination Is Without Boundaries

I do not believe in race as such. Race is a fraud. All modern people are the conglomeration of so many ethnic mixtures that no pure race remains.

What we don't know is much more than what we know.

What use are socks? They only produce holes.

This is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher. The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.

Our schoolbooks glorify war and conceal its horrors. They indoctrinate children with hatred. I would teach peace rather than war, love rather than hate.

What is significant in one's own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?

Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension.

Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot

Schools need not preach political doctrine to defend democracy. If they shape men capable of critical thought and trained in social attitudes, that is all that is necessary.

To understand the world one must not be worrying about one's self.

Assumptions are made and most assumptions are wrong.

It's no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge. Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty.

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

Insofar as we may at all claim that slavery has been abolished today, we owe its abolition to the practical consequences of science

... one does people the best service by giving them some elevating work to do and thus indirectly elevating them.

I make it a rule not to clutter my mind with simple information that I can find in a book in five minutes.

My deep religiosity [...] found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books.

I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation.

When I was young, all I wanted and expected from life was to sit quietly in some corner doing my work without the public paying attention to me. And now see what has become of me.

The faster you go, the shorter you are.

We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions.

Qualities I sought in a scientific theory were naturalness, inner perfection and logical simplicity from an aesthetic approach.

My intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a globe he doesn't notice that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it.

The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.

Chess holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer.

X + Y + Z X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.

A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory.

My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

A man has to work so hard so that something of his personality stays alive. A tomcat has it so easy, he has only to spray and his presence is there for years on rainy days.

New frameworks are like climbing a mountain - the larger view encompasses rather than rejects the more restricted view.

People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live.

One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.

Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.

If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.