"What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character ... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly."

Niels Bohr Philosophy See all quotes by Niels Bohr →

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“Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be.”

“I am absolutely prepared to talk about the spiritual life of an electronic computer: to state that it is reflecting or is in a bad mood... The question whether the machine really feels or ponders, or whether it merely looks as though it did, is of course absolutely meaningingless.”

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

“Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.”

“Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.”

“It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.”

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