The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.
There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.
My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.
Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.
The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
To be adult is to be alone.
Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.
Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.
Truth is always served by great minds, even if they fight it.
Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.
In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.
It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.
Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife she has thought much worse things about you.
One kills a man, one is an assassin one kills millions, one is a conqueror one kills everybody, one is a god.
To be adult is to be alone (etre adulte c'est etre seul).
A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.
God, that dumping ground of our dreams.
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from...
It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.