J. Robert Oppenheimer Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Science is not skepticism. It is not the practice of science to look for things to doubt.

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

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

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

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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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