For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly familiar and trustworthily physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we realize that we are like shipwrecked people trying to keep their balance on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whether they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.

The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family

In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god.

All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, "What are light quanta?" Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.

Compound interest on debt was the banker's greatest invention, to capture, and enslave, a productive society.

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