Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

It seems that this quote has only begun to be attributed to Einstein recently, the earliest published source located being the 2008 book Visualization for Dummies by Bernard Golden, p. 85. Before that it was often attributed to the physicist John Wheeler, who quoted the saying in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, p. 10. In fact, this quip is much older; the earliest source located is Ray Cummings' 1921 short story "The Time Professor", which includes the passage: '"I do know what time is," Tubby declared. He paused. "Time," he added slowly -- "time is what keeps everything from happening at once ...".' Cummings repeated the quote in his 1922 science fiction novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, available on Project Gutenberg here (according to Science-Fiction: The Early Years by Everett F. Bleiler, p. 171, the novel was a composite of two earlier stories published in 1919 and 1920). Chapter V contains the following paragraph: The Big Business Man smiled. "Time," he said