J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

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.

Science starts with preconception, with the common culture, and with common sense. It moves on to observation, is marked by the discovery of paradox, and is then concerned with the correction of preconception. It moves then to use these corrections for the designing of further observation and for more refined experiment. And as it moves along this course the nature of the evidence and experience that nourish it becomes more and more unfamiliar; it is not just the language that is strange [to common culture].

I was born in New York in 1904.

To the confusion of our enemies.

I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead, who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured'.

I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.

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'.

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

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 knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.

A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.

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.

Submit an agreement providing for the peaceful absorbtion of a celestial races in such a manner that our culture would remain intact with guarantee that their presence not be revealed." "One must consider the fact that mis-identification of these space craft for a intercontinental missile in a re-entry phase of flight could lead to accidental nuclear war with horrible consequences.

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

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.

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

Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.

[About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s]
It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.

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

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.

Genius sees the answer before the question.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The experience of seeing how our thought and our words and our ideas have been confined by the limitation of our experience is one which is salutary and is in a certain sense good for a man's morals as well as good for his pleasure. It seems to us [scientists] that this is an opening up of the human spirit , avoiding its provincialism and narrowness.

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.

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.

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.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

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.

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.

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

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

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

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.

I am literally become death, destroyer of actual worlds.

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

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

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