J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
16 quotes from J. Robert Oppenheimer — Theoretical physicist who directed the Manhattan Project, creating the atomic bomb..
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
“Genius sees the answer before the question.”
“I need physics more than friends.”
“Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.”
“The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.”
“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.”
“Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.”
“Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.”
“I'm responsible for ruining a beautiful place.”
“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 multiarmed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
“There is no indication in the entire record that Dr. Oppenheimer has ever divulged any secret information. The past 15 years of his life have been investigated and reinvestigated. For much of the last 11 years he has been under actual surveillance, his movements watched, his conversations noted, his mail and telephone calls checked. This professional review of his actions has been supplemented by enthusiastic amateur help from powerful personal enemies.”
“I think there are issues which are quite simple and quite deep, and which involve us as a group of scientists — involve us more, perhaps, than any other group in the world.”
“We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing.”
“I think when you play a meaningful part in bringing about the death of over 100,000 people and the injury of a comparable number, you naturally don't think of that with ease. I believe we had a great cause to do this, but I do not think that our consciences should be entirely easy at stepping out of the part of studying nature, learning the truth about it, to change the course of human history.”
“This open access to knowledge, these unlocked doors and signs of welcome, are a mark of a freedom as fundamental as any. They give a freedom to resolve difference by converse, and, where converse does not unite, to let tolerance compose diversity.”
“A tissue of lies.”
