Quotes from Isidor Isaac Rabi

[Science is] a great game. It is inspiring and refreshing. The playing field is the universe itself.

As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.

Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.

We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids ?

It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this.

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, "So? Did you learn anything today?" But not my mother. "Izzy," she would say, "did you ask a good question today?" That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.