Bell, John Stewart

"I have nothing to hide from you, God knows I am no pillar of virtue, but I do try"

"It is a great prejudice to assume that experimental physicists are not capable of original theoretical thought"

"The paradoxes only show that something is wrong. It may be the experimental data, it may be the way we're trying to interpret the data, or it may be a bad theoretical ideology that we are trying to fit the data into"

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme but that they are intolerant"

"I would like to see quantum mechanics taught so that students learn to think about it in a simple way"

"In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself—nature does it for you"

"The task is to modify the theory so that the modified theory accounts for the new data"

"I suspect that what we call the real world is incorrigible only with reference to some particular conceptual framework"

"Bertrand Russell once remarked that even if he were told he would die in the next five minutes, he would still find time to write something"

"It seems that the theory is becoming increasingly complex in trying to explain less and less"

"The effort is to rid the theory of the infinities that appear in it"

"We must be careful not to ask the impossible question: the question which cannot be answered"

"Do not accept any authority without questioning"

"It may well be, however, that this is because I lived in a peculiar epoch and in peculiar circumstances"

"If I have a fundamental belief that influences my thinking, it is a belief in the power of simple ideas"

"The physicist and the man in the street do not use the term 'reality' in the same way"

"I am, I believe, thinking about the same things as those concerned with the foundations of other sciences"

"Hidden variables seem most attractive to me"

"There must be something wrong with the axioms"

"The freedom to doubt is an important feature, I would say, of science"

"I have been treating the whole matter somewhat lightly perhaps"

"The results of the experiment seem to support the view that there is no deep reality"

"To avoid the appearance of obscurantism, one might prefer to have hidden variables"

"At long last you see that even in the case of single particles you must be prepared for fundamentally atomistic phenomena"

"I believe that nothing we do is insignificant and that everything matters"

"The analysis of these difficulties is a challenge for the theorist"

"One must maintain a healthy respect for skepticism"

"The inequalities violated by quantum mechanics provided a criterion for acceptable hidden variable theories"

"What determines whether an idea is right or wrong in physics"

"I am convinced that the hidden variables are not there"