"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane"
About this Quote
The subtext is personal. Tesla was both celebrated and sidelined, a visionary who watched institutions, committees, and credentialed experts consolidate power around “modern science.” His own work often arrived as bold conceptual leaps, but his public reputation also attracted the caricature of the mad genius. This quote reads like self-defense and counterattack at once: he separates imagination from incoherence, and he implies that the scientific mainstream is indulging in the latter while calling it sophistication.
Context matters: the period was thick with new abstract frameworks - electromagnetism formalized, relativity and early quantum ideas reshaping physics. That shift rewarded mathematical depth and specialization, sometimes at the expense of the engineer’s demand for operational clarity. Tesla, the inventor, is arguing for a different hierarchy of virtue: not how far your mind can roam, but whether it can return with something usable.
It works rhetorically because “sane” is a deliberately loaded gatekeeping word. He’s not diagnosing mental illness; he’s staging a morality play about intellectual responsibility. Thinking that can’t be made clear isn’t just hard to understand - in Tesla’s framing, it’s flirting with madness masquerading as brilliance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World (Nikola Tesla, 1934)
Evidence: “The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. “Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments and they wander off through equation after equation and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” (Pages 40–42 & 117–119 (quote appears in the section titled “What About Today’s Scientists?”)). This wording appears as a quoted passage within the article/interview piece credited to Nikola Tesla ("as told to" Alfred Albelli) in Modern Mechanix and Inventions, July 1934. The Tesla Universe page reproduces the article and explicitly lists the magazine, month/year, and page range, and it contains the quote under the heading “What About Today’s Scientists?”. However, Tesla Universe is a reproduction, not the magazine scan itself; to verify “FIRST published” with high confidence, you should consult a scan or physical copy of the July 1934 issue on the cited pages. Other candidates (1) Timeless Quotes (Eli Jr, 2023) compilation96.6% ... Nikola Tesla "The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of ... The scientists of t... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Tesla, Nikola. (2026, February 8). The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-scientists-of-today-think-deeply-instead-of-1057/
Chicago Style
Tesla, Nikola. "The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane." FixQuotes. February 8, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-scientists-of-today-think-deeply-instead-of-1057/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane." FixQuotes, 8 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-scientists-of-today-think-deeply-instead-of-1057/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2026.














