If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Ernest Rutherford

Now I know what the atom looks like.

Ernest Rutherford

The great object is to find the theory of the matter [of X-rays] before anyone else, for nearly every professor in Europe is now on the warpath.

Ernest Rutherford

I am a great believer in the simplicity of things and as you probably know I am inclined to hang on to broad & simple ideas like grim death until evidence is too strong for my tenacity.

Ernest Rutherford

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

Ernest Rutherford

If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.

Ernest Rutherford

Don’t let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.

Ernest Rutherford

I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. The best sprinters in this road of investigation are Becquerel and the Curies...

Ernest Rutherford

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Ernest Rutherford

I’ve just finished reading some of my early papers, and you know, when I’d finished I said to myself, “Rutherford, my boy, you used to be a damned clever fellow.”

Ernest Rutherford

In the light of the physicists have,I think,some justification for their faith that they are building on the solid rock of fact,and not,as we are often so solemnly warned by some of our scientific brethren,on the shifting sands of imaginative hypothesis.

Ernest Rutherford

We are rather like children, who must take a watch to pieces to see how it works.

Ernest Rutherford