Edward Teller Quotes

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

Good questions outrank easy answers.

Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life's metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.

My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

Who doesn't love the parables? You know there's a solution, but you have to do some work to find it.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding.

For the subtlest folly proceeds from the subtlest wisdom.

Posing good questions is harder than it might seem... It's hard because asking good questions requires you to see past the easy answers and to focus instead on the difficult, the tricky, the mysterious, the awkward, and sometimes the painful. ... Great leaders don't have all the answers, but they know how to ask the right questions - questions that force others and themselves to move past old and tired answers, questions that open up possibilities that, before the question, went unseen.

Appreciating complexity while searching through its thickets to find essential factors leads to understanding.

I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.

Without theory we can only copy.

If you you think there is a solution, you're part of the problem.

To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.

Where everyone else sees a straight line, you see a maze, and when I'm done talking to you, the maze starts to make more sense --Reply by Dove to Aly's silent inquiry

I think of how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

F. Scott Fitzgerald has an indespensible quote: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at once and still retain the ability to function'. Or, as I like to call it, 'O.J. killed his wife, and the police are corrupt.'

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

All true knowledge contradicts common sense.

Sometimes, the best answer is a more interesting question.