Werner Heisenberg

“There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.”

“Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.”

“My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.”

“If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamenta...”

“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more...”

“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. A...”

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.”

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

“I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neigh...”

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be...”

“Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.”

“For Germany, the war was like an end game in chess in which she possessed one castle less than her adversary. The loss of the war was as certain as the loss of an end game under these condit...”

“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 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 val...”

“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 thin...”

“The German physicists knew at least so much about the manufacture and construction of atomic bombs that it was clear to them that the manufacture of bombs in Germany could not succeed during...”

“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. In Germany, an effort one thousa...”

“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.”

“The Anglo-Americans want the balance of power in Eurasia. The only balance of power they can achieve now is the whole of Europe against Russia. The only choice for us is either to join this...”

“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.”