"The history of scientific and technical discovery..." - Quote by Albert Einstein
The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the idea comes.
More by Albert Einstein
“Everything has changed except the way man thinks (when the hydrogen bomb was exploded)”
“I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.”
“I see in Nature a magnificent structure... that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.”
More on Discovery
“The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things.”
“It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth.”
“Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.”