
“Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.”
Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991) by Edward Teller, Wendy Teller and Wilson Talley, Ch. 10, p. 150 footnote
This quote has many variants. An early version attributed to the Göttingen School appears in a book review by Heinrich Wieleitner in Isis, Volume 7, No. 4, December 1925, p. 597: Ach, die Physik! Die ist ja für die Physiker viel zu schwer! (Oh, physics! That's just too difficult for the physicists!).
Disputed
“Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.”
Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991) by Edward Teller, Wendy Teller and Wilson Talley, Ch. 10, p. 150 footnote
“... like most physicists, I really enjoy talking about physics.”
[A Conversation with Nima Arkani-Hamed: The Power of Principles, Physics Revealed (Part I), April 2, 2021, Ideas Roadshow, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6_iJRY6nU4] (quote at 2:47 of 57:39)
As quoted in American Journal of Physics, Vol. 14 | (1946), p. 248
in his Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2003/ginzburg-lecture.html, December 8, 2003, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University.
[Physics Today, A Lowbrow's View of Feynman, 42, 2, 1989, 10.1063/1.881197] (p. 85)
The Expanding Universe. (1933) Ch. IV The Universe and the Atom
Source: Dynamics in Psychology, 1940, p. 116
"Interview with George Gamow" http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4325.html, by Charles Weiner at Professor Gamow's home in Boulder, Colorado (25 April 1968)
1950s, On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation (1950)
Physics, in What is Science?: Twelve Eminent Scientists and Philosophers Explain Their Various Fields to the Layman, by James Roy Newman, published by Simon and Schuster (1955), p. 102