J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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
It did not take atomic weapons to make man want peace, a peace that would last. But the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It has made the prospect of future war unendurable.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
It's not that I don't feel bad about it. It's just that I don't feel worse today than what I felt yesterday.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the phyicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge that they cannot lose.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead, who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured'.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
It was evening when we came to the river
With a low moon over the desert
that we had lost in the mountains, forgotten,
what with the cold and the sweating
and the ranges barring the sky.
And when we found it again,
In the dry hills down by the river,
half withered, we had
the hot winds against us.

There were two palms by the landing;
The yuccas were flowering; there was
a light on the far shore, and tamarisks.
We waited a long time, in silence.
Then we heard the oars creaking
and afterwards, I remember,
the boatman called us.
We did not look back at the mountains.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and—to go a step further—our mathematicians do not know mathematics.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance — these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
We have done the devil's work. Now we have come back to our real job, which is to devote ourselves exclusively to research.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
It is almost as hard to tell a man what it is like to find out something new about the world as it is to describe a mystical experience to a chap who has never had any hint of such an experience.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
The past is in one respect a misleading guide to the future: It is far less perplexing.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
We probably have no very good idea today of the range of problems that will be accessible to science.

J. Robert Oppenheimer