“Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”
-Albert Einstein
Law, after all, is an expression of the human mind, not, necessarily, of the human heart.
Read more on On Tolerating Freedom – A Crisis in American Culture…
“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
-Albert Einstein
Even the most enlightened among us are, for the most part, products of their environment and the society in which they live. Maintaining an open mind and forming unbiased opinions is not only very difficult, it is the rarest of commodities in an increasingly divisive world – whether it left vs. right, rich vs. poor, or one “true religion” vs. any other.
“For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly trustworthy physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we are like shipwrecked people on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whither they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment.”
-Albert Einstein, letter, 26 April, 1945
“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”
-Albert Einstein
It has been called the true indication of madness: doing a thing over and over and expecting a different result. And so it is in expecting solutions to the problems that plague us to derive from a mentality that fostered the problems in the first place.
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
How many times have you wanted to slap someone upside the head who responds with; “Like – whatever”
Such laziness and disrespect implied in such a phrase soon becomes more than an expression of attitude, but of character as well.
“The free, unhampered exchange of ideas and scientific conclusions is necessary for the sound development of science, as it is in all spheres of cultural life.”
-Albert Einstein
Science is the unfettered pursuit of pure knowledge. An ideal that can never be fully realized as even the most open human mind – the mind of an Einstein – carries with it the inevitable traces of personal bias. But we can maintain that ideal nonetheless.
“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
-Albert Einstein
The true secret of Albert Einstein’s genius was not his raw intellectual power but his ability to harness that intellect to a sense of pure wonder and intense curiosity in everything around him.
“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”
It took years for Einstein to formulate his theories of special and general relativity. As he himself said, it was through “no special talent” that he unlocked these insights into how the universe works, but due to his “passionate curiosity”. Einstein thus found the will and inspiration to persevere, transforming physics and how we look at our world.
“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”
-Albert Einstein, as quoted in Glimpses of the Great (1930) by G. S. Viereck.
“Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality”
-Albert Einstein
One man stands on a train platform inside a train station, another stands on a speeding train as it moves through the station. Both mean seek what is true - Reality.
