Max Born

“The problem of the nature of the constituent of matter has been from the earliest times a subject for the most earnest thought of mankind.”

“The world is not a deterministic system, as Laplace thought; it is a system of probabilities.”

“But the ultimate decisions about the fate of mankind are not made by scientists, but by political and military leaders.”

“The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.”

“If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellects that in order to predict its future, we need not share in His perfection, but can be satisfied with approximations.”

“Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist must be rather silly.”

“Intellectual slavery is the worst of all slaveries.”

“I believe that ideas such as absolute certainty, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science.”

“There is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed.”

“All great discoveries in experimental physics have been due to the intuition of men who made free use of models which were not likely to be satisfactory representations of the real world.”

“Chance... is a more fundamental conception than causality.”

“I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.”

“Science is not formal logic-it needs the free play of the mind in as great a degree as any other creative art.”