Albert Einstein - Out of My Later Years (1950)

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Freedom of teaching and of opinion in book or press is the foundation for the sound and natural development of any people.

Albert Einstein
Physics too deals with mathematical concepts; however, these concepts attain physical content only by the clear determination of their relation to the objects of experience.

Albert Einstein
All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions.

Albert Einstein
We all try to escape pain and death, while we seek what is pleasant.

Albert Einstein
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations.

Albert Einstein
At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on.

Albert Einstein
It may affront the military-minded person to suggest a regime that does not maintain any military secrets.

Albert Einstein
It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors... are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts-in short, the psychological factors-are considered as unimportant and secondary.

Albert Einstein
Physics constitutes a logical system of thought which is in a state of evolution, whose basis cannot be distilled, as it were, from experience by an inductive method, but can only be arrived at by free invention.

Albert Einstein
I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supranational organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?".

Albert Einstein
But could not our situation be compared to one of a menacing epidemic? People are unable to view this situation in its true light, for their eyes are blinded by passion. General fear and anxiety create hatred and aggressiveness. The adaptation to warlike aims and activities has corrupted the mentality of man; as a result, intelligent, objective and humane thinking has hardly any effect and is even suspected and persecuted as unpatriotic.

Albert Einstein
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein
The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

Albert Einstein
There is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.

Albert Einstein
The doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

Albert Einstein
What is significant in one's own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?

Albert Einstein
They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.

Albert Einstein
It is an outcome of faith that nature-as she is perceptible to our five senses-takes the character of such a well formulated puzzle.

Albert Einstein
One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion. Unless the concept of peace based on law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it can hardly hope to succeed.

Albert Einstein
All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us.

Albert Einstein
The real difficulty, the difficulty which has baffled the sages of all times, is rather this: how can we make our teaching so potent in the motional life of man, that its influence should withstand the pressure of the elemental psychic forces in the individual?

Albert Einstein
Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

Albert Einstein
Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.

Albert Einstein
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.

Albert Einstein
Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

Albert Einstein