Albert Einstein Intellectual Quotations

The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.

Only the [Catholic] Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

My intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field.

My pacifism is not based on any intellectual theory but on a deep antipathy to every form of cruelty and hatred.

I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values.

It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes.

The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the indispensable pre-condition of a satisfactory existence, but in itself it is not enough. In order to be content, men must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent accords with their personal characteristics and abilities.

Strenuous intellectual work and the study of God's Nature are the angels that will lead me through all the troubles of this life with consolation, strength, and uncompromising rigor.

I have always disliked the fierce competitive spirit embodied in that highly intellectual game.

When the nazis came to power, I looked to the universities that prided themselves upon their intellectual freedom, and they failed me. I looked to the German press, which prided itself on the freedom of the press, and it failed me. Until at last the churches stood alone, and that for which I once had little regard earned my respect.

Engineering is not only study of 45 subjects but it is moral studies of intellectual life. Make things as simple as possible..but not simpler.

I refuse to engage in an intellectual battle with an unarmed man.