Top 100 Oppenheimer's Quotes
#1. Oppenheimer's theorizing was so startlingly original - so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research - that his colleagues' ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved.
Algis Valiunas
#2. As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer's ordeal signified that the postwar "messianic role of the scientists" was now at an end.
Kai Bird
#3. when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing - a very bad, an execrable drawing - of a bomb.
Richard Rhodes
#4. How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?
Sting
#5. Although Oppenheimer's mind was not the whiz-bang computer of a John von Neumann or the astral navigation system of a Hans Bethe, it processed other men's original contributions so adeptly that for multifaceted excellence it may well have been the finest scientific instrument of all.
Algis Valiunas
#6. My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#7. For my part, as a filmmaker, I've never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it's a lie.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#8. At our production company, the trademark dish - and this sounds particularly revolting - is curried pickled herring.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#9. Dirac politely refused Robert's [Robert Oppenheimer] two proffered books: reading books, the Cambridge theoretician announced gravely, "interfered with thought."
Luis Walter Alvarez
#11. Diamonds are a key component in the campaign to make poverty history.
Nicky Oppenheimer
#12. There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#13. We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#14. America is a country of entrepreneurship and great business leaders.
Nicky Oppenheimer
#15. Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.
Michael Oppenheimer
#16. I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#17. I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#18. The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#19. Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally.
Frank Oppenheimer
#21. There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#22. Like many children of the rich and famous, Paris Hilton didn't always get to spend quality time with her parents, especially her mother. A socially ambitious young woman, Kathleen Elizabeth Avanzino Richards Hilton, who had married into the celebrated Hilton Hotel family, was often out and about.
Jerry Oppenheimer
#23. I don't think Africa gets as much credit as it should have on the world stage. People tend to think of us as coming from The Dark Continent, where nothing good goes on. That's not true. A huge amount of, as I say, entrepreneurship goes on.
Nicky Oppenheimer
#24. What I've always been most interested in is exposing the way stories and fantasies reconstitute our everyday reality. What appears to be non-fiction is not only totally mysterious, unfathomable, and strange when you really look at what it is.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#26. The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#27. In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#28. 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
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#29. Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#30. Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#31. I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#32. Here at great expense,' [Colonel Groves] moaned to Oppenheimer, 'the government has assembled the world's largest collection of crackpots.
Steve Sheinkin
#33. In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#34. I don't think there's a morally perfect way to do anything in life, but I'm not a filmmaker who tries to hide my mess.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#35. I think that indignation is pleasurable, and it's pleasurable because it's self-righteous.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#36. I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the 'economic means' for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the 'political means'.
Franz Oppenheimer
#38. 'The Look of Silence' is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It's distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#39. Scientists and artists are the world's noticers. Their job is simply to notice what other people cannot.
Frank Oppenheimer
#40. My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#41. You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#42. We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it's what makes us we are. It's what delineates the borders of our societies.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#43. When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#44. If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no'.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#45. You see, 'The Look of Silence' is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It's normally never done because it is too dangerous.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#46. If you film a little boy going to school, the big event in that boy's day and all the classmates' and teachers' day is you being there filming, not the school.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#47. I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#48. I have always thought that the rapid economic development of South Africa would in the long run prove to be incompatible with the government's racial policies, and recent events have tended to confirm my opinion.
Harry Oppenheimer
#49. I'm sure it's one of the most frustrating aspects of human experience for all of us, that when we tell someone who's hurt us that they've hurt us, they tend to react with anger because they feel guilty, and we know we also get angry when we feel guilty.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#50. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#51. I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#52. I think 'The Act of Killing' forced people to look at the problem, but the problem is actually a state run by thugs, or a shadow state, a part of the state that's run by thugs, and a military that enjoys complete legal - not just impunity, but immunity.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#53. When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#54. It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#55. I think we are fascinated and scared by evil at the same time. I think it's important not to suppress our fascination but to walk into it with open eyes.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#58. Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#59. Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#60. From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting 'The Act of Killing' and then editing it.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#62. Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?
Joshua Oppenheimer
#63. Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#64. You can get a diamond which is worth 10 cents; you can get a diamond of exactly the same size, which is worth a hundred dollars.
Nicky Oppenheimer
#65. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#67. Military rule in Indonesia formally ended in 1998, but the army remains above the law.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#68. Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#69. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#70. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#71. If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#72. Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course accept those invitations because I could document what happened that way.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#73. No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#74. I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#75. The filmmakers have a story they want to tell, and they go get the material they need for it. The film either exceeds or fails to meet up to their expectations or it's different.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#77. I still receive very regular death threats that make it impossible for me to return to Indonesia. I think I could get in, but I don't think I could get out again.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#78. There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#79. Films can't change the society; they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#80. The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#82. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#83. To recruit staff, I traveled all over the country talking with people who had been working on one or another aspect of the atomic-energy enterprise and people in radar work, for example, and underwater sound, telling them about the job, the place that we are going to, and enlisting their enthusiasm.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#84. I think for a while now people have been scared to be out of TMT the commonly used acronym for technology-media-telecom stocks, which have tended to rise in tandem recently and the feeling has really been you have to be there ... but now we're getting a dose of reality.
Peter Oppenheimer
#85. I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man.
Franz Oppenheimer
#87. Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. "Rutherford wouldn't have me," Oppenheimer recalled. "He didn't think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar.
Kai Bird
#88. In Denmark, the annual Christmas party is probably the most important cultural institution in the country.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#89. In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#90. The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.
Kai Bird
#91. I think it's our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#92. It's much nicer to be known as Mr. Nice Guy than Mr. Nasty Guy. But you've got to have lines - and when you hit the line, that's the end of the story, nice guy or not.
Nicky Oppenheimer
#93. At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#94. There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#95. All we can do is find the courage to stand still and to look backwards.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#97. Businesses need certainty, to see clearly the rules of engagement for investing in South Africa.
Nicky Oppenheimer
#98. The army taught me to sign my name very quickly, and that's stood me in good stead the rest of my life.
Nicky Oppenheimer
#99. To put it crudely, 'The Act of Killing' would blast open the space for the more delicate film, 'The Look of Silence,' to do its work.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#100. Denial, panic, threats, anger - those are very human responses to feeling guilt.
Joshua Oppenheimer
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