J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

Manifestly not every finding leads straight to invention; but it is hard to think of major discoveries about nature; major advances in science, which have not had large and ramified practical consequences.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Despite all the richness of what men have learned about the world of nature, of matter and of space, of change and of life, we carry with us today an image of the giant machine as a sign of what the objective world is really like.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
General relativity has very few connections with any other part of physics and, as I said, is something that we might just now be beginning to discover...

J. Robert Oppenheimer
It is in our hands to see that the hope of the future is not lost, because we were too sure that we knew the answers, too sure that there was no hope.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Scientists aren't responsible for the facts that are in nature. It's their job to find the facts. There's no sin connected with it — no morals. If anyone should have a sense of sin, it's God. He put the facts there.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Often the very fact that the words of science are the same as those of our common life and tongues can be more misleading than enlightening, more frustrating to understanding than recognizably technical jargon.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Distrust all the philosophers who claim that by examining science they come to the results in contradiction with common sense. Science is based on common sense; it cannot contradict it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
It is possible that in the large light of history, if indeed there is to be history, the atomic bomb will appear not very different than in the bright light of the first atomic explosion.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. 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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
A great discovery is a thing of beauty; and our faith — our binding, quiet faith — is that knowledge is good and good in itself.

J. Robert Oppenheimer