Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962)
Jewish Danish physicist.
Your theory is crazy, the question is whether it's crazy enough to be true.
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
Truth and clarity are complementary.
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.
Of course not ... but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.
What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character ... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.
Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.
Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.
Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be.