“Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.”

I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo-Saxons such tremendous power that Europe will become a bloc under Anglo-Saxon domination. If that is the case, it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether Stalin will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

Sometimes a poor performance is better for enjoyment, because you can look at those things that were wrong and analyze them.

The end of the First World War had thrown Germany’s youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.

If the lecture is good, then everything is too smooth. That’s the same in music: if the performance is too good, you really don’t enjoy it, because it just goes by, and you can never penetrate into the heart of it.

If we made atomic bombs, we would bring about a terrible change in the world. Who knows what would happen from this?

If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data.

Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists.

In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort.

The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form – the one of the particles, the other of the waves – are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

I think that if a United States of Europe were to be formed, it would be in our interests to fight for it, as all our old traditions would remain in such a united Europe, whereas if we were to start now as part of the Russian Empire, everything that had ever been in Germany would disappear.

Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.

The single life is bearable to me only through my work in science, but for the long term, it would be very bad if I had to make do without a very young person next to me.

With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.

The United States is showing minimal and diminishing interest in the Muslim world. They now have to confront their own problems. The old excuses are gone. The old justifications are gone and therefore the anger of people is turning increasingly against their own rulers.

It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.

The issues which today confront the nation are clearly defined and so fundamental as to directly involve the very survival of the Republic. Are we going to preserve the religious base to our origin.

What’s more confrontational than thugs and criminals looting our businesses?

The … problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a “real” man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.

Every time you make a movie you have to confront your fears.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music.

The Welfare State, South Africa – and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.