Quotes from Nikola Tesla

We have soon to have everywhere smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonizers, sterilizers of water, air, food and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads and in subways. It will become next to impossible to contract disease germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will got to town to rest and get well.

I myself eschew all stimulants. I also practically abstain from meat.

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.

To conquer by sheer force is becoming harder and harder every day. Defensive is getting continuously the advantage of offensive, as we progress in the satanic science of destruction.

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.

Most certainly, some planets are not inhabited, but others are, and among these there must exist life under all conditions and phases of development.

All the great religions contain wise prescriptions relating to the conduct of life, which hold good now as they did when they were promulgated.

Inventors don't have time for married life.

From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

I have already demonstrated, by crucial tests, the practicability of signaling by my system from one to any other point of the globe, no matter how remote, and I shall soon convert the disbelievers.

My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.

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

I constructed a laboratory in the neighborhood of Pike's Peak. The conditions in the pure air of the Colorado Mountains proved extremely favorable for my experiments, and the results were most gratifying to me.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity.

The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

It is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

I have always been ahead of my time.

We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will.

The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter - for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.

All knowledge or form conception is evoked through the medium of the eye, either in response to disturbances directly received on the retina or to their fainter secondary effects and reverberations. Other sense organs can only call forth feelings which have no reality of existence and of which no conception can be formed.

Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.