Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.

Thanks to my fortunate idea of introducing the relativity principle into physics, you (and others) now enormously overrate my scientific abilities, to the point where this makes me quite uncomfortable.

That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful, and then only for a short while.

The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final.

The bombing of civilian centers was initiated by the Germans and adopted by the Japanese. To it, the Allies responded in kind—as it turned out, with greater effectiveness—and they were morally justified in doing so.