Nikola Tesla Quotes
You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.
October, 1947Source:
... I do not believe that capital punishment is proper. I do not see how one person can condemn another to death.
October 16th, 1902Source:
The secondary discharge of this apparatus is so powerful that it was always more or less dangerous for the safety of the laboratory and machinery in the same, and elsewhere, to let it play. A number of times the shop caught fire by sparks passing from some nail, wire or any kind of conductor. When the discharge was playing sparks were seen to fly almost everywhere through the laboratory, from one to another object and it was evident that it was more or less risky to let the sparks from the free terminal pass to the ground, because short waves were produced in the conductors and these were only too apt to rupture the insulation of any apparatus in the circuit or circuits connected with the oscillator or in the neighbourhood of the same.
January 1st, 1900
It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering — only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world.
January 7th, 1905
Man was born to work, to suffer and to fight, because whoever does not do so must perish.
The toastmaster wanted him (Nikola Tesla) to talk about electricity, but he said that was something of which he knew nothing.
February 24th, 1905Source:
... There is an ideal striving which is the effort of the human mind to free itself from materialistic fetters. But there is no individuality. You wouldn't say a wave on the ocean had individuality. It is a succession of waves. You are not the same person today that you were yesterday. I am just a concatenation of existences which are nearly, but not exactly, alike. It is this concatenation which produces the effect of continuance, like a motion picture. What Tesla gives to posterity is not the product or Tesla, but of a succession of existences.
July 10th, 1932
They (decorations) mean nothing — take them away. The only thing that counts is the good that my work might bring to humanity.
July 11th, 1937
I have studied cosmic rays to learn that the theory of relativity has been what I long considered it — "a beggar dressed in purple which the ignorant mistake for a king."
July 11th, 1935
But among all these many departments of research, these many branches of industry, new and old, which are being rapidly expanded, there is one dominating all others in importance—one which is of the greatest significance for the comfort and welfare, not to say for the existence, of mankind, and that is the electrical transmission of power.
March, 1897Source: