Senility Quotes (2 quotes)
Like an earthquake, true senility announces itself by trembling and stammering.
In Charlas de Café: pensamientos, anécdotas y confidencias (1920, 1967), 95. (Café Chats: Thoughts, Anecdotes and Confidences). As (loosely) translated in Peter McDonald (ed.) Oxford Dictionary of Medical Quotations (2004), 83. From the original Spanish, “La verdadera, la aterradora, la inexorable senilidad comienza en la fase de temblor y balbuceo, es decir, cuando el cerebro está salpicado de placas seniles y entendimiento y carácter retroceden al estado infantil. A semejanza del edificio cuarteado por el terremoto, la citada agitación anuncia ruina inminente.”
A more complete translation attempted by Webmaster with Google Translate is: “True, the terrifying, the inexorable senility begins at the stage of tremor and slurred speech, i.e. when the brain is dotted with senile plaques, and understanding and character regress to the infantile state. Like the building cracked by the earthquake, said agitation announces impending doom.”
You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world that objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. … Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.
Letter to Max Born (7 Sep 1944). In Born-Einstein Letters, 146. Einstein Archives 8-207. In Albert Einstein, Alice Calaprice, Freeman Dyson, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2011), 393-394. Often seen paraphrased as “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.” Also see a related quote about God playing dice on the Stephen W. Hawking Quotes page of this website.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
