0: A Warm-Up Exercise: Did Einstein Say It?

(No submission. Not for credit.)

For discussion in the recitation.

People love to quote Einstein and with good reason. He had a lot to say. However many of things attributed to him are things he never said. The list below is a mix of:

(a) things he did say; ("YES")

(b) things that he definitely never said; ("NO")

(c) things that he may have said, but we cannot find a definite source. ("MAYBE")

Which of the following are YES, NO and MAYBE? You will find many hard to decide, so just make your best guess. Give reasons for your classification. And have fun with it--it's just a warm up!
(Remember: that some website somewhere attributes the quote to Einstein does not mean is a real Einstein quote. There are many spurious attributions on the web!)

God is subtle but he is not malicious.

Everything is relative.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

At the age of 12 I experienced a second wonder of a totally different nature: in a little book dealing with Euclidean plane geometry.

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.

I frame no hypotheses.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks!

I do not believe that the Good Lord plays dice.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Compound interest is man’s greatest invention.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.