Now the soft-voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished, in her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies in making herself as much as possible like man—in dress, voice and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind.

— Nikola Tesla

Of all things, I liked books best.

— Nikola Tesla

One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

— Nikola Tesla

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and will never end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functioning of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise. I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.

— Nikola Tesla

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.

— Nikola Tesla

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

— Nikola Tesla

The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

— Nikola Tesla

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

— Nikola Tesla

The idea of atomic energy is illusionary, but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.

— Nikola Tesla

The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

— Nikola Tesla