“Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me.
- Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp”
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Albert Einstein
“For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible. Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have any hold on him.”
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Albert Einstein
“An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion soon degenerates. For force always attract men of low morality.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Schopenhauer’s saying, that “a man can do as he will, but not will as he will,” has been an inspiration to me since my”
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Albert Einstein
“The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence -- these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.”
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Albert Einstein
“We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.”
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Albert Einstein
“The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.”
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Albert Einstein
“But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
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Albert Einstein
“A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
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Albert Einstein
“A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.”
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Albert Einstein
“If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
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Albert Einstein
“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
―
Albert Einstein
