The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

You can always tell when a man’s well informed. His views are pretty much like your own.

And yet it moves.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as ‚failed states.‘

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Science is nothing but perception.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves – with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

The economy’s always been the engine for our national security.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

The product of mental labor – science – always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

If you judge, investigate.

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

I believe there are no questions that science can’t answer about a physical universe.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.