J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.Collection: Work
My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Humor
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.Collection: Science
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.Collection: Death
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.Collection: History
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Future
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Success
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.Collection: Best
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.Collection: Science
The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.
My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
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.
I need physics more than friends.
To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.
No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.
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.
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.
I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.
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.
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.Collection: Science
Genius sees the answer before the question.Collection: Genius
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)Collection: Nuclear
The people of this world must unite or they will perish.Collection: People
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Faith
Truth, not a pet, is man's best friend.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: War
There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.Collection: Men
Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: World
The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Freedom
Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Profound
Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.Collection: Thinking