Edward Teller Quotes

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool.

I think that intellectuals who end up in hell will have to read page proofs and check indexes there.

There is a time for scientists and movie stars and those who have flown the atlantic to restrain their opinions lest they be taken more seriously than they should be.

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

I believe in good. It is an ephemeral and elusive quality. It is the center of my beliefs, but it cannot be strengthened by talking about it.

I believe in excellence. It is a basic need of every human soul. All of us can be excellent, because, fortunately, we are exceedingly diverse in our ambitions and talents.

There's no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

No endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

One may say that predictions are dangerous particularly for the future. If the danger involved in a prediction is not incurred, no consequence follows and the uncertainty principle is not violated.

Nationalism has little to contribute today except further suffering.

If to a poet a physicist may speak
Freely, as though we shared a common tongue,
For "peace in our time" I should hardly seek
By means that once proved wrong.
It seems the Muscovite
Has quite a healthy, growing appetite.
We can't be safe; at least we can be right.
Some bombs may help - perhaps a bomb-proof cellar,
But surely not the Chamberlain umbrella.
The atom is now big; the world is small.
Unfortunately, we have conquered space.
If war does come, it comes to all,
To every distant place.
Will people have the dash
That Britons had when their world seemed to crash
Before a small man with a small mustache?
You rhyme the atoms to amuse and charm us -
Your counsel should inspire, and not disarm us.

(Teller's reply to an anonymous British man's poem/message (that Americans are too belligerent), both in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists).

Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb, there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian. I have no regrets.

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty until found effective.

A state-of-the-art calculation requires 100 hours of CPU time on the state-of-the-art computer, independent of the decade.

Most people avoid thinking if they can, some of us are addicted to thinking, but Von Neumann actually enjoyed thinking, maybe even to the exclusion of everything else.

Physics without mathematics is meaningless.

If not for me, the H-bomb would have been developed in Russia first. In the U.S., we'd now be speaking Russian.

If anyone wants a hole in the ground, nuclear explosives can make big holes

No, I'm the infamous Edward Teller.

In the theater you create a moment, but in that moment, there is a touch, a twinkle of eternity. And not just eternity, but community ... That connection is a sense of life for me.

I hate doubt, yet I am certain that doubt is the only way to approach anything worth believing in.

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to EMOTIONALLY comprehend the exponential function.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple. That at some time, they, too, will appear as simple consequences of a theory of which no one has yet dreamed is not a statement of fact.It is a statement of faith.

In our educational institutions applied science may almost be described as a "no-man's land."

Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

U.S. has lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.

Society's emissions of carbon dioxide may or may not turn out to have something significant to do with global warming-the jury is still out.

My experience has been in a short 77 years that in the end when you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win.

Two paradoxes are better than one they may even suggest a solution.

On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

It is often claimed that knowledge multiplies so rapidly that nobody can follow it. I believe this is incorrect. At least in science it is not true. The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler. This, of course, goes contrary to what everyone accepts.

[Chemistry] laboratory work was my first challenge ... I still carry the scars of my first discovery-that test-tubes are fragile.

Knowing he [Bob Serber] was going to the [first atom bomb] test, I asked him how he planned to deal with the danger of rattlesnakes. He said, 'I'll take along a bottle of whiskey.' ... I ended by asking, 'What would you do about those possibilities [of what unknown phenomena might cause a nuclear explosion to propagate in the atmosphere]?' Bob replied, 'Take a second bottle of whiskey.