J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.

Genius sees the answer before the question.

There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.

The people of this world must unite or they will perish.

When we deny the EVIL within ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny but of any possibility of dealing with the EVIL of others.

We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Truth, not a pet, is man's best friend.

There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.

The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.

When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it.

We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).

We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

We know too much for one man to know too much.

The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.

The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

To the confusion of our enemies.

I need physics more than friends.

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

The powerful notion of entropy, which comes from a very special branch of physics … is certainly useful in the study of communication and quite helpful when applied in the theory of language.

I can't think that it would be terrible of me to say - and it is occasionally true - that I need physics more than friends.

Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics.

The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.

In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything

Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.

To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.

We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.

Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.

Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.

The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.

You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human.

If we must live with a perpetual sense that the world and the men in it are greater than we and too much for us, let it be the measure of our virtue that we know this and seek no comfort.

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.