Top 94 Quotes & Sayings by J. Robert Oppenheimer
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
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.
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.
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
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.
I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
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.
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
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 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.
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.
I was born in New York in 1904.
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.
My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.
I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.
To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.
I need physics more than friends.
My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.
No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
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.
Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.
Truth, not a pet, is man's best friend.
We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.
We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. 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.
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.
Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.
The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.
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 Hiroshima. The people must unite or they will perish.
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.
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.
There must be no barriers for 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.
Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. 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.
The people of this world must unite or they will perish.
We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.
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.
Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.
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'.
There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
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. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
Genius sees the answer before the question.
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
Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)
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.
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.
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