Albert Einstein - Out of My Later Years (1950)

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

Albert Einstein
Ethical axioms are founded and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

Albert Einstein
Man like every other animal is by nature indolent. If nothing spurs him on, then he will hardly think, and will behave from habit like an automaton.

Albert Einstein
Conscious man, to be sure, has at all times been keenly aware that life is an adventure, that life must, forever, be wrested from death.

Albert Einstein
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Albert Einstein
For scientific endeavor is a natural whole the parts of which mutually support one another in a way which, to be sure, no one can anticipate.

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

Albert Einstein
But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.

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
Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us.

Albert Einstein
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

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

Albert Einstein
And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader. This characteristic is reflected in the qualities of its priests, the intellectuals. The intellect has a sharp eye for methods and tools, but is blind to ends and values. So it is no wonder that this fatal blindness is handed on from old to young and today involves a whole generation.

Albert Einstein
Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression (partly in conjunction with sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others), and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of the bodily object.

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
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
Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man.

Albert Einstein
Man can find meaning in life only through devoting himself to society.

Albert Einstein
It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.

Albert Einstein
The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

Albert Einstein
Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind.

Albert Einstein
Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.

Albert Einstein