Text: Albert Einstein

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein, Letter of 1950, as quoted in “The New York Times”
 (29 March 1972) and “The New York Post” (28 November 1972).

Albert  Einstein (1879–1955) – theoretical physicist, was in succession firstly a German, then a stateless person (1896), a Swiss (1901) and later had dual Swiss and American citizenship (1940). In 1905, he  published his special theory of relativity, and in 1916 his theory of gravitation called the general theory of relativity. He made a significant contribution to the development of quantum mechanics and the  philosophy of science. In 1921, he won the  Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is regarded today as one of the greatest scientists in history and his famous E=mc2 formula for mass–energy equivalence in a given system