J. Robert Oppenheimer - Men Quotes

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

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
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
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
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 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
If we must live with a perpetual sense that the world and the men in it are greater than we and too much for us, let it be the measure of our virtue that we know this and seek no comfort.

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