Albert Einstein:......

"My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of people is disgusting. My attitude is not derived by any intellectual theory, but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred."

In 1939, a Hungarian physicist, Szilard, told Einstein, that the Germans might be developing an atom bomb. Einstein was opposed to such development by anyone, but he wrote a letter to Roosevelt and encourage him to start a nuclear weapons research program. The next month, Sept. 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Still, Einstein refused to be part of the development of the nuclear bomb and made that clear publically. He had sadly acknowledged, in 1933 that fighting the Nazis was necessary: "Organized power can only be opposed by organized power."

After WW II, Germany wanted to mend relations with Einstein, whose books, the Nazis burned. Nazi newspapers had applauded his departure from Germany. The Nazi/Germans referred to Einsteins Theory of Relativity as "The Jewish Theory."
------ "The Germans have slaughtered my Jewish breatheren. I will have nothing further to do with the Germans."

(When he briefly attended schools in Germany, he had hated their strictness and rigidity and emphasis on rote memorization. His education in Switzerland was much more comfortable and enjoyable.)

Due to Einstein's pacifism, the FBI/Hoover, kept a file on Einstein from 1940 to 1954 and recommended against his employment.

Einstein strongly opposed Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt for alleged Communists in the 1950s. Einstein was one of the first to speak up against this and said of McCarthy's "investigations" of alleged Communists.... "The current investigations are a greater danger to our society than those few Communists in our country could ever be."

"I sometimes ask myself, how did it come that I was the one to develop the Theory of Relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things that he has thought of as a child....But I had only begun to think about space and time only when I had already grown up."

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Born: 1879 Ulm, Germany
1914: accepts research position a University of Berlin
1915: Theory of Relativity
1922: Nobel Prize in Physics. $32,000
1933: Nazis come to power in Germany. Einstein comes to the U.S.A.
1939: Letter to Roosevelt urging research in nuclear weapons (his fear Germany would develop one)
1940: Takes oath to become a U.S. citizen
1952: Ben Gurion offers Einstein Presidency (ceremonial) of Israel. Declines.***
1955: Dies at age 76. Abdominal aneurysm.

*** Denial of Presidency of Israel. 1952:
"I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel....and at once saddened and ashamed that I can not accept it. My relationship to the Jewish People has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." -- Albert Einstein.

1999. Time Magazine cover: "Albert Einstein: "Man of the Century."