J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

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

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.

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

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.

To the confusion of our enemies.

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

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

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

Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

I was born in New York in 1904.

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.

A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.

I need physics more than friends.

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

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

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.

The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.

Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.

I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.

The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.

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

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

I am literally become death, destroyer of actual worlds.

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

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

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

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

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

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

Genius sees the answer before the question.

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

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

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

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

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.

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

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