Albert Einstein - Ideas and Opinions (1952)

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For while religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra.

Albert Einstein
One has to realize that the powerful industrial groups concerned in the manufacture of arms are doing their best in all countries to prevent the peaceful settlement of international disputes, and that rulers can achieve this great end only if they are sure of the vigorous support of the majority of their peoples.

Albert Einstein
Knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.

Albert Einstein
Striving for peace and preparing for war are incompatible with each other, and in our time more so than ever.

Albert Einstein
An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.

Albert Einstein
The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society. Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province.

Albert Einstein
The only rational way of educating is to be an example. If one can't help it, a warning example.

Albert Einstein
As to science, we may well define it for our purpose as "methodical thinking directed toward finding regulative connections between our sensual experiences".

Albert Einstein
I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a "matter-of-fact" habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. … The frightful dilemma of the political world situation has much to do with this sin of omission on the part of our civilization. Without "ethical culture," there is no salvation for humanity.

Albert Einstein
Everybody felt his superiority, but nobody felt oppressed by it. Though he had no illusions about people and human affairs, he was full of kindness toward everybody and everything. Never did he give the impression of domineering, always of serving and helping. He was extremely conscientious, without allowing anything to assume undue importance; a subtle humor guarded him, which was reflected in his eyes and in his smile.

Albert Einstein
My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.

Albert Einstein
The aim (of education) must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals who, however, see in the service to the community their highest life problem.

Albert Einstein
Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.

Albert Einstein
Communities tend to be guided less than individuals by conscience and a sense of responsibility. How much misery does this fact cause mankind! It is the source of wars and every kind of oppression, which fill the earth with pain, sighs and bitterness.

Albert Einstein
The discovery of nuclear chain reactions need not bring about the destruction of mankind any more than did the discovery of matches. We only must do everything in our power to safeguard against its abuse. Only a supranational organization, equipped with a sufficiently strong executive power, can protect us.

Albert Einstein
The payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Albert Einstein
But if the longing for the achievement of the goal is powerfully alive within us, then shall we not lack the strength to find the means for reaching the goal and for translating it into deeds.

Albert Einstein
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!

Albert Einstein
This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.

Albert Einstein
Anti-Semitism is nothing but the antagonistic attitude produced in the non-Jew by the Jewish group. This is a normal social reaction. The Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the antagonism it has forever met in the world... the root cause is their use of enemies they create in order to keep solidarity...

Albert Einstein
He who…can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.

Albert Einstein
I know that it is a hopeless undertaking to debate about fundamental value judgements. For instance, if someone approves, as a goal, the extirpation of the human race from the earth, one cannot refute such a viewpoint on rational grounds. But if there is agreement on certain goals and values, one can argue rationally about the means by which these objectives may be obtained.

Albert Einstein
The idea of achieving security through national armament is, at the present state of military technique, a disastrous illusion.

Albert Einstein
Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

Albert Einstein
We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

Albert Einstein
The series of integers is obviously an invention of the human mind, a self-created tool which simplifies the ordering of certain sensory experiences.

Albert Einstein
Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

Albert Einstein
Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.

Albert Einstein
The Press, which is mostly controlled by vested interests, has an excessive influence on public opinion.

Albert Einstein
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Albert Einstein