J. Robert Oppenheimer - Knowledge Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The knowledge which comes to us at such a terrifyingly, inhumanly rapid rate has some order in it. We are allowed to forget a great deal, as well as to learn. The order is never adequate. The mass of understanding things, which cannot be summarized, or wholly ordered, always grows greater; but a great deal does get understood.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

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