Top 74 Quotes About Robert Oppenheimer
#1. The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations - Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others - were natives of Europe and America.
David Ben-Gurion
#2. 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
#3. Dirac politely refused Robert's [Robert Oppenheimer] two proffered books: reading books, the Cambridge theoretician announced gravely, "interfered with thought."
Luis Walter Alvarez
#4. The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#5. Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#7. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#8. We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#9. In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#10. This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do ...
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#13. My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#15. All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#18. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#19. SumeBAccess to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#22. 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
#23. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that it is good to learn ... that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge ... with anyone who is interested ... that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#24. To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#25. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#27. The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance-these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#28. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#30. In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#31. I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#32. 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
#33. In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#34. The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#35. Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#36. The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#37. There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#38. Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#39. Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. 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
#44. There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#45. 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
#46. 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
#49. Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#54. 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
#55. 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
#58. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#59. Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#62. 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
#63. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#64. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#65. 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
#66. We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#67. My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#68. The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#70. 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
#72. In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#73. 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
#74. The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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