It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance-these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.
We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
The people of this world must unite or they will perish.
Truth, not a pet, is man’s best friend.
Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Genius sees the answer before the question.
The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.
The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.