The Quotable Einstein

Alice Calaprice, the in-house editor for Princeton's Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, began working with the Einstein archives in 1978. As the years went by, she found herself enamoured of certain quotes and began keeping an index-card file of those excerpts. After arranging them by subject, carefully researching their sources and adding the words of ""others on Einstein,"" she has compiled The Quotable Einstein. ""Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind,"" he said in 1921, before most of the world recognized it. But not everything was quite so lofty: ""To obtain an assured favorable response from people,"" he wrote to a chocolate manufacturer in 1954, ""it is better to offer them something for their stomachs rather than their brains.""