One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out o…

- Abraham Pais

The rule of the game was never assume that anybody, however honorable, would be able to stand up under torture. If Mr. X, who knew where I was, was c…

- Abraham Pais

There is not a soul on Earth who can read the deluge of physics publications in its entirety. As a result, it is sad but true that physics has irretr…

- Abraham Pais

I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next le…

- Abraham Pais

Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to …

- Abraham Pais

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is fill…

- Abraham Pais

I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself ki…

- Abraham Pais

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were intially at a loss as to…

- Abraham Pais

[Heisenberg's seminal 1925 paper initiating quantum mechanics marked] one of the great jumps—perhaps the greatest—in the development of twentieth cen…

- Abraham Pais