J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

The history of science is rich in the 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.

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.... "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

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
We live today in a world in which poets and historians and men of affairs are proud that they wouldn't even begin to consider thinking about learning anything of science, regarding it as the far end of a tunnel too long for any wise man to put his head into.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
When technical people talk they always emphasize the facts [of which] they are not sure.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The true responsibility of a scientist... is to the integrity and vigor of his science. And because most scientists, like all men of learning, tend in part also to be teachers, they have a responsibility for the communication of the truths they have found.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Whatever the individual motivation and belief of the scientist, without the recognition from his fellow men of the value of his work, in the long term science will perish.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
One may only hope that what is at the moment just a picture of chaos will ultimately reveal again that deep harmony and order which one has always found in the physical world when one has pushed hard, and which is very beautiful indeed.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do...

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The day is long past - if indeed it ever existed except in legend - when the whole of science was the expert province of any one man.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The profession I'm part of has, as its whole purpose, the rendering of the physical world understandable and beautiful. Without this you have only tables and statistics.

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer
When the time is run, and that future become history, it will be clear how little of it we today foresaw or could foresee.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The only thing that we can say about the properties of the ultimate particles is that we know nothing whatever about them.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Knowledge rests on knowledge; what is new is meaningful because it departs slightly from what was known before; this is a world of frontiers, where even the liveliest of actors or observers will be absent most of the time from most of them.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
One thing science can do, and rarely does: it can correct the inherited views that it has by accident at another stage given to common sense, and which turn out to be not true.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Research is action; and the question I want to leave in a very raw and uncomfortable form with you is how to communicate this sense of action to our fellow men who are not destined to devote their lives to the professional pursuit of new knowledge.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The theory of our modern technical [era] shows that nothing is as practical as theory.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
We cannot in any sense be both the observers and the actors in any specific instance, or we shall fail properly to be either one or the other; yet we know that our life is built of these two modes, is part free and part inevitable, is part creation and part discipline, is part acceptance and part effort.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
We are not today tempted to search for these keys that unlock the whole of human knowledge and man's experience. We know that we are ignorant; we are well taught it, and the more surely and deeply we know our own job the better able we are to appreciate the full measure of our pervasive ignorance.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable and the unknown is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of all forms of art.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
There is only one future of atomic explosives that I can regard with any enthusiasm: that they should never be used in war.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
A subject is much harder to understand when no one understands it. The world is really an open place, but we start with such crude and limited experience, and our minds are so determined by that experience, that when science carries us into new domains we are not always prepared for what we encounter, and we are floored by it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
In fact, most people — when they speak of Science as a good thing — have in mind such Technology as has altered the condition of their life.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no'.

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer
A change in science, whether novelty or discovery, when properly understood, when the linguistic problem is adequately solved, will even then provide only a hunch, a starting point for looking at an area of experience other than the science in which it was nourished and born.

J. Robert Oppenheimer