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

I need physics more than friends.

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

I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.

I am literally become death, destroyer of actual worlds.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Genius sees the answer before the question.

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

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

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

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

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

The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.

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

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

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.