Shocking Sayings

4,673 sayings found

I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims.

— Werner Heisenberg Unknown, likely after WWII
Shocking

There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.

— Werner Heisenberg Likely in conversations leading to the 1986 book, but conversations over many years
Shocking

It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consists only of processes involving ex…

— Werner Heisenberg 1952
Shocking

Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking.

— Werner Heisenberg Unknown
Shocking

When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.

— Werner Heisenberg Unknown
Shocking

Our proposition that the physicists on both sides should not advance the production of atomic bombs, was thus indirectly, if one wants to exaggerate the point, a proposition in favor of Hitler.

— Werner Heisenberg November 17, 1956
Shocking

My Führer! I am most deeply shaken by the message that my son Erwin has been sentenced to death by the People's Court. The acknowledgement for my achievements in service of our fatherland, which you, my Führer, have expressed towards me in repeated a…

— Max Planck October 1944
Shocking

The highest court is in the end one's own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief. For me, it is belief in a complete lawfulness in everything that hap…

— Max Planck October 19, 1930
Shocking

There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.

— Max Planck 1937
Shocking

New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his w…

— Max Planck January 1936
Shocking

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

— Niels Bohr Unknown
Shocking

When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it.

— Niels Bohr Unknown
Shocking

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

— Niels Bohr Likely a recurring comment in debates with Einstein
Shocking

It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.

— Niels Bohr Unknown
Shocking

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

— Niels Bohr Unknown
Shocking

We are suspended in language.

— Niels Bohr 1963 (Quoted in Aage Petersen, 'The Philosophy of Niels Bohr')
Shocking

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

— Niels Bohr Unknown
Shocking

The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

— Niels Bohr Unknown
Shocking

We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our b…

— Erwin Schrodinger 1954
Shocking

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

— Erwin Schrodinger 1958
Shocking