J. Robert Oppenheimer > Quotes

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“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

“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.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

“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

“If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of worlds.

[Quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

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

“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

“To the confusion of our enemies.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“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

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

“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

“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 enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Knowledge cannot be pursued without morality.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“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'.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Open Mind

“[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

“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

“Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“You put a hard question on the virtue of discipline. What you say is true: I do value it—and I think that you do too—more than for its earthly fruit, proficiency. I think that one can give only a metaphysical ground for this evaluation; but the variety of metaphysics which gave an answer to your question has been very great, the metaphysics themselves very disparate: the bhagavad gita, Ecclesiastes, the Stoa, the beginning of the Laws, Hugo of St Victor, St Thomas, John of the Cross, Spinoza. This very great disparity suggests that the fact that discipline is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror—But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore 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

“68. "The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“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.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises For Physicists

“Being wealthy might seem to be "supremely enviable," he wrote, but "the business of wealth-getting, and of wealth-enjoyment, when viewed at close range, turns out to be a very different matter.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Finally, I think we believe that when we see an opportunity , we have the duty to work for the growth of that international community of knowledge and understanding with our colleagues in other lands , with our colleagues in competing, antagonistic, possibly hostile lands, with our colleagues and with others with whom we have any community f interest, any community of professional, of human, of political concern. [...] We think of this as our contribution to the making of a world which is varied and cherishes variety, which is free and cherishes freedom, and which is freely changing to adapt to the inevitable needs of change in the twentieth century and all centuries to come, but a world which, with all its variety, freedom, and change, is without nation states armed for war and above all, a world without war.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises For Physicists

“I would urge the principle of self-limitation in regard to wealth," and he made this "plea to the wealthy": The first step to take, it they would set themselves right, is to live in the midst of superfluous wealth as if they were not the possessors of it; that is, to take for their own use only what they require for the essentials of a civilized life, and to regard the rest as a deposit for the general good, of which they themselves are not to be the beneficiaries.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“When you see something technically sweet you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it, only after you have achieved success.”
― J. Robert 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

“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.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer