Edward Teller Quotes (1908-2003)

“At present the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 2 per cent over normal. By 1970, it will be perhaps 4 per cent, by 1980, 8 per cent, by 1990, 16 per cent [about 360 parts per million, by Teller’s accounting], if we keep on with our exponential rise in the use of purely conventional fuels. By that time, there will be a serious additional impediment for the radiation leaving the earth. Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5. But when the temperature does rise by a few degrees over the whole globe, there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise. Well, I don’t know whether they will cover the Empire State Building or not, but anyone can calculate it by looking at the map and noting that the icecaps over Greenland and over Antarctica are perhaps five thousand feet thick.”

“I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.”

“I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.”

“I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.'''”

“I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.'''”

“... Heisenberg's main work — his wonderful work — on the uncertainty principle ... Some very important people — like Einstein — did not like this. ... His remark was, "I can believe that God governs the world with any set of laws, but I cannot believe that He is playing at dice. ..." ... Einstein's statement — his remark — was really something to the effect: "I cannot imagine any science without causality ..."”

“On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.”

“... I have something of a guess: Bohr liked paradoxes. I wanted to eliminate contradictions. He liked those contradictions. And — what I said so far is true — but what I am now going to say is probably true. And — Bohr liked contradictions with good reason ... The simple, straightforward way how we see the world ... it is not a wavefunction. It is something that I can describe and understand. If I don't start from such ideas then I can't possibly know what I'm talking about. ... You must start from practical theory with all the contradictions that a detailed observation then leads to. Then as a next step you resolve these contradictions.”

“I don't want to kill anybody. I am passionately opposed to killing, but I'm even more passionately fond of freedom. The freedom of Dr. Pauling and of myself expressing our opinions freely on any subject, however broad, however far removed of our proper competence, but particularly, to be able to express our opinions in the fields we really know; this would not be possible in Russia.”

“Gamow was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; … and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new.”

“I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, "I don't believe in it."”

“On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.”

“Business institutions universities Both are quite the circus where the killer wants his way I think of Edward Teller and his moribund reprise Then I look to Nevada and I can't believe my eyes It's time for him to die!”

“Dr. Teller has a mind very different from mine. I think one needs both kinds of minds to make a successful project. I think Dr. Teller's mind runs particularly to making brilliant inventions, but what he needs is some control, some other person who is more able to find out just what is the scientific fact about the matter. Some other person who weeds out the bad from the good ideas.”

“Teller's mistake was his failure to foresee that a large section of the public would not consider his appearance at the Oppenheimer hearing to be decent behavior. Had Teller not appeared, the outcome of the hearing would almost certainly have been unaffected, and the moral force of Teller's position would not have been tainted.”

“The physicist Edward Teller, known as the “father of the H-bomb,” went further to deny that omnicide—a concept he derided—was remotely feasible. In answer to a question I posed to him as late as 1982, he said emphatically it was “impossible” to kill by any imaginable use of thermonuclear weapons that he had co-invented “more than a quarter of the earth’s population.” At the time, I thought of this assurance, ironically, as his perception of “the glass being three-quarters full.” (Teller was, along with Kahn, Henry Kissinger, and the former Nazi missile designer Wernher von Braun, one of Kubrick’s inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove.) And Teller’s estimate was closely in line with what the JCS actually planned to do in 1961, though a better estimate (allowing for the direct effects of fire, which JSC calculations have always omitted) would have been closer to one-third to one-half of total omnicide. But the JCS were mistaken in 1961, and so was Herman Kahn in 1960, and so was Teller in 1982. Nobody’s perfect. Just one year after Teller had made this negative assertion (at a hearing of the California state legislature which we both addressed, on the Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze Initiative), the first papers appeared on the nuclear-winter effects of smoke injected into the stratosphere by firestorms generated by a thousand or more of the fifty thousand existing H-bombs used on cities. Contrary to Kahn and Teller, an American Doomsday Machine already existed in 1961—and had for years—in the form of pre-targeted bombers on alert in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), soon to be joined by Polaris submarine-launched missiles. Although this machine wasn’t likely to kill outright or starve to death literally every last human, its effects, once triggered, would come close enough to that to deserve the name Doomsday.”

“He is a danger to all that is important. I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller.”

“After he suffered a stroke three years ago, a nurse quizzed him to probe his lucidity. "Are you the famous Edward Teller?" she queried. "No," he snapped. "I'm the infamous Edward Teller."”