Swiss author Quotes

“I agree with your remark about loving your enemy as far as actions are concerned. But for me the cognitive basis is the trust in an unrestricted causality. 'I cannot hate him, because he must do what he does.' That means for me more Spinoza than the prophets.”

“Life is like a bicycle; keep moving on to maintain balance.”

“Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam? Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.”

“Intelligence and genius”

“It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better.”

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”

“Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.”

“The important thing is to never stop questioning. Never lose a holy curiosity.”

“It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.”

“Only a very dull man spells a word the same way twice.”

“Realising the healthy international relations can be created only among populations made up of individuals who themselves are healthy and enjoy a measure a independence, the United Nations elaborated a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 1948.”

“People will not disarm step by step; they will disarm at one blow or not at all.”

“Capitalism creates a huge community of producers who are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor, and an oligarchy that cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized society....the subjugation is not by force but because the privileged class has long ago established a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.”

“I don't know what weapons will be used in the Third World War. But I can tell you what they'll use in the Fourth - rocks!”

“Imagination is the most powerful force in the universe.”

“I have made no secret, either privately or publicly, of any sense of outrage over officially enforced military and war service. I regard it as a duty of conscience to fight against such barbarous enslavement of the individual with every means available.”

“The woman who follows the crowd will usually believe that I said this.”

“The best design is the simplest one that works.”

“Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.”

“One cannot learn so well as by experiencing it oneself.”

“To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.”

“The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.”

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

“Force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule thattyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.”

“I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings.”