Oppenheimer Quotes

There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

Testimony always comes from people who are in some way disempowered. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

Genius sees the answer before the question. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

The best way to learn is to teach ~ Frank Oppenheimer

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

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

I don't drink in the cinema because I have a bladder the size of a hummingbird. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

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

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

Denial, panic, threats, anger - those are very human responses to feeling guilt. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

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

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

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

A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

Scientists and artists are the world's noticers. Their job is simply to notice what other people cannot. ~ Frank Oppenheimer

Trinity's witnesses responded just as those to Apollo 11 would, as J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." Oppenheimer later said the he beheld his radiant blooming cloud and thought of Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Aloud, however, the physicist made the ultimate engineer comment: "It worked. ~ Craig Nelson

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

It is only through developing and maximizing all its natural resources that a sustainable future for Africa and its people can be secured. ~ Nicky Oppenheimer

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

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. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

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

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

There are committed Indonesian filmmakers who are committed supporters of 'The Act Of Killing.' ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

We're seeing diamonds coming back into favor. ~ Nicky Oppenheimer

Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience? ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

Nobody ever flunked a science museum ~ Frank Oppenheimer

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

'The Act of Killing' helped catalyze this basic transformation in how the media talks about the past. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. In fact, and I who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring the charge of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championship - these are the men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners. ~ Jack London

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

I was born in New York in 1904. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black. ~ Harry Oppenheimer

If this were a courageous country,
it would ask Gloria to lead it
since she is sane and funny and beautiful and smart
and the National Leaders we've always had
are not.
When I listen to her talk about women's rights
children's rights
men's rights
I think of the long line of Americans
who should have been president, but weren't.
Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth.
John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo.
Imagine President Martin Luther King confronting
the youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine President
Malcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President Stevie
Wonder dealing with the "Truly Needy."
Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, or
Sweet Honey in the Rock
dealing with Anything.
It is imagining to make us weep with frustration,
as we languish under real estate dealers, killers,
and bad actors. ~ Alice Walker

Host: For those of you just tuning in, our guests tonight are the amazing Murder Magician, and his lovely minion, The Assistant ...
Assistant: Charmed, I'm sure
Host: Who recently killed The Rumor. And you were awarded the Oppenheimer prize for villainy at last week's annual summit for dastardly deeds
what are you going to do with all that money?
Murder Magician: Well, I'm so glad you asked that
because I spent all the money on this giant MURDERBOT, and I've been dying to show it off!
Assistant: It's true ... every penny.
Host: Wow! That's impressive! So what does it do?
Murder Magician: Well, Mr. Clark ... it murders people.
Laughter.
Murder Magician: I'm serious.
Assistant: He is. ~ Gerard Way

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

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

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

'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation). ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

Mr. President, I have blood on my hands. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

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

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

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

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

The Kimberley Process is not a perfect construct, and it is necessary now to re-double efforts to address its remaining shortcomings and strengthen its provisions. ~ Nicky Oppenheimer

Businesses need certainty, to see clearly the rules of engagement for investing in South Africa. ~ Nicky Oppenheimer

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

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

May I suggest that people in many African countries could be suffering from donation fatigue? ~ Nicky Oppenheimer

After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they went through a real Renaissance where military dictatorship took over. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

SystemC AMS provides a great modeling and simulation framework for integrated heterogeneous systems. The SystemC AMS 2.0 standard brings new capabilities for advanced behavioral modeling (e.g., multi-rate systems) and higher maturity for improved industrial acceptance. We at OFFIS see it as a major stepping stone towards a design methodology for cyber-physical systems. In our research we work on seamlessly integrating extra-functional properties such as power, temperature and aging into SystemC AMS models. ~ Frank Oppenheimer

Millions of Indonesians who live with secrets in their family who have a sense of that kind of secret that their parents never told them, want to be told about what happened so they can know where they come from. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Were they like Star Trek's Star-Base 9, polyglot, ~ Stephen Oppenheimer

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

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

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

We all need to become more customer-focused and recognize the power of marketing to sell more diamonds. ~ Nicky Oppenheimer

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

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Diamonds are a key component in the campaign to make poverty history. ~ Nicky Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer, The State, p. 15: What, then, is the State as a sociological concept? The State, completely in its genesis ... is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group of men on a defeated group, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors. And ~ Murray N. Rothbard

I have a British and an American passport. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

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

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]. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

[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. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. Black holes are the places in the universe where general relativity is decisive. But Einstein never acknowledged his brainchild. Einstein was not merely skeptical, he was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. He thought that the black hole solution was a blemish to be removed from his theory by a better mathematical formulation, not a consequence to be tested by observation. He never expressed the slightest enthusiasm for black holes, either as a concept or as a physical possibility. Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although in retrospect we can say that they were his most important contribution to science. The older Einstein and the older Oppenheimer were blind to the mathematical beauty of black holes, and indifferent to the question whether black boles actually exist.

How did this blindness and this indifference come about? ~ Freeman Dyson

Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.'

I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.

But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was ali ~ Jeanette Winterson

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

Fermi, superb experimentalist that he was, contributed valuably to the program of experimental studies, defining with clarity problems that needed to be examined. For him the war work was duty, however, and the eager conviction he found on the Hill puzzled him. "After he had sat in on one of his first conferences here," Oppenheimer recalls, "he turned to me and said, 'I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.' I remember his voice sounded surprised. ~ Richard Rhodes

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

The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

Here at great expense,' [Colonel Groves] moaned to Oppenheimer, 'the government has assembled the world's largest collection of crackpots. ~ Steve Sheinkin

Any father likes his son to take over from him if possible. ~ Nicky Oppenheimer

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

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

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

Cinema is, of course, the great storytelling medium of modernity. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

I need physics more than friends. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

I don't like to eat when I watch films because it distracts me. Anything crunchy or in a wrapper is terrible. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

Through the international hotel empire, the Hilton name has become synonymous with class and sophistication. ~ Jerry Oppenheimer

I wanted to resist in 'The Look of Silence' making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

In calling someone a bad guy, I reassure myself that I'm good. I elevate myself. I call it the 'Star Wars morality'. And unfortunately, it underpins most of the stories we tell. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

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

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

Waking from any fever dream, one retains, above all, impressions seared into memory. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

I am literally become death, destroyer of actual worlds. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

The worst lie ever told is that it is easier to destroy than to create. This lie makes people apathetic about a number of imminently avoidable horrors, particularly the nuclear ones. But Oppenheimer didn't just go outside one day and trip over an atomic bomb. Nuclear development required trillions of dollars and a massive sustained effort by America's top politicians, military advisors, and scientific geniuses. Not one damn bit of it was easy. It was certainly harder that sitting down with Stalin or Khrushchev and having a talk . . .
America had options. The path of destruction was a choice. It has always been America's choice, and we citizens have always shrugged, assuming it's too late to turn back the doomsday clock, although we're the ones who wound it in the first place. ~ Israel Morrow

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

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. ~ Michael Oppenheimer