Richard Feynman

I would rather have a world with five billion people that didn't know how to read than a world with five billion people that all knew how to read and all thought the same thing.

I was in an intellectual fight with my father, and I kept saying, 'But the books say it!' And he said, 'The books are wrong!'

I'm not a popularizer. I'm not trying to tell the public what to think. I'm just telling them what I think.

I don't believe in the idea of a 'common man' or a 'common woman.' I believe in individual people.

The thing that bothered me about it was that I was doing work for the military, and I didn't like that.

I was once in a situation where I was giving a lecture, and I had some equations on the board. A guy in the audience stood up and said, 'Professor Feynman, your equations are wrong!' I looked at them and said, 'You're right!'

I have a friend who is an artist and has some pictures which he thinks are very good... and he says, 'I am a value-free man. I don't believe in values.' And I say, 'Oh, really? Then why are your pictures good?'

I actually did not have to learn a thing for my thesis. It was all stuff I already knew.

I was very surprised that a lot of artists, when they found out I was a scientist, they would start telling me about their theories of the universe, and they were always crackpot theories.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing—that's what counts.

I asked him once, 'How do you tell when a mathematical argument is correct?' He said, 'If it's beautiful, it's correct.'

The thing that I cannot understand is that I can't understand it.

I don't have to be a gentleman.

I bet you anything that if you asked a hundred physicists, they would all say that the most beautiful equation in physics is Maxwell's equations.

I don't see anything wrong with being confused.

The easiest way to fool yourself is to believe something because you want it to be true.

I was talking to a guy who was a philosopher, and he said, 'But you're just describing the world, you're not explaining it.' And I said, 'Yeah, that's what science is. We describe it. We don't explain it.'

I don't know anything about anything.

The great thing about science is that it's a way of not fooling yourself.

I would often go to these conferences where they would talk about the ultimate theory, and I would always say, 'What's the ultimate experiment?'