Today, in twelve countries, young men are resisting conscription and refusing military service. They are the pioneers of a warless world.
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.
There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
There comes a point where the mind takes leap – call it intuition or what you will – and come out upon a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.
There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them.
The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.
The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.[Der wahre Wert eines Menschen ist in erster Linie dadurch bestimmt, in welchem Grad und in welchem Sinn er zur Befreiung vom Ich gelangt ist.]
The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost; one feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.
