Edward Teller Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

Edward Teller
Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.

Edward Teller
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.

Edward Teller
It is often claimed that knowledge multiplies so rapidly that nobody can follow it. I believe this is incorrect. At least in science it is not true. The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler. This, of course, goes contrary to what everyone accepts.

Edward Teller
Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.

Edward Teller
A proof in science does more than eliminate doubt. It eliminates inconsistencies and provides the underlying logical basis of the statement.

Edward Teller
I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, "I don't believe in it."

Edward Teller
We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

Edward Teller
Religion was not an issue in my family; indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years.

Edward Teller
I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in.

Edward Teller
The preservation of peace and the improvement of the lot of all people require us to have faith in the rationality of humans. If we have this faith and if we pursue understanding, we have not the promise but at least the possibility of success. We should not be misled by promises. Humanity in all its history has repeatedly escaped disaster by a hair's breadth. Total security has never been available to anyone. To expect it is unrealistic; to imagine that it can exist is to invite disaster. What we do have in our technological capacities is an opportunity to use our inventiveness, our creativity, our wisdom and our understanding of our fellow beings to create a future world that is a little better than the one in which we live today.

Edward Teller
What is called understanding is often no more than a state where one has become familiar with what one does not understand.

Edward Teller
My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say?... Look. Say it three times more, and I throw you out of this office.

Edward Teller
Science introduces consistency and simplicity into a world that without them appears confused and random.

Edward Teller
If there ever was a misnomer, it is "exact science." Science has always been full of mistakes. The present day is no exception. And our mistakes are good mistakes; they require a genius to correct. Of course, we do not see our own mistakes.

Edward Teller
Beyond the scientific responsibility to search the horizon of human knowledge, the responsibilities of scientists cannot be any greater than those of any other citizen in our democratic society. The consequences of scientific discoveries are the responsibility of the people.

Edward Teller
Could we have avoided the tragedy of Hiroshima? Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands? No one knows. No one can find out.

Edward Teller
Science, like music or art, is not something that can or should be practiced by everybody. But we want all children to be able to enjoy music, to be able to tell good music from poor music, so we teach them to appreciate music in a discriminating manner. That should be the aim in science education for the nonscientist.

Edward Teller
If anyone wants a hole in the ground, nuclear explosives can make big holes

Edward Teller
It took us eighteen months to build the first nuclear power generator; it now takes twelve years; that's progress.

Edward Teller
I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

Edward Teller
At the end of the war, most people wanted to stop. I didn't. Because here was more knowledge. And in the coming uncertain period, with a dangerous man like Stalin around, and our incomplete knowledge, I felt that more knowledge is necessary. Among the people who knew a great deal about the hydrogen bomb, I was the only advocate of it. And that is, I think, my contribution. Not that I invented it, others would have — and others in the Soviet Union did. But I was the one person who put knowledge, and the availability of knowledge, above everything else.

Edward Teller
I believe that no endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.

Edward Teller
By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple. That at some time, they, too, will appear as simple consequences of a theory of which no one has yet dreamed is not a statement of fact.
It is a statement of faith.

Edward Teller
I believe in excellence. It is a basic need of every human soul. All of us can be excellent, because, fortunately, we are exceedingly diverse in our ambitions and talents.

Edward Teller
No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will prove simple in retrospect.

Edward Teller
On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.

Edward Teller
Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.

Edward Teller
There's no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

Edward Teller
I don't want to kill anybody. I am passionately opposed to killing, but I'm even more passionately fond of freedom. The freedom of Dr. Pauling and of myself expressing our opinions freely on any subject, however broad, however far removed of our proper competence, but particularly, to be able to express our opinions in the fields we really know; this would not be possible in Russia.

Edward Teller