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Quotes by J. Robert Oppenheimer


The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
Any man [Albert Einstein] whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
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
No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.
– 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
There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
There must be no barriers for 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 asssertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
We knew the world could not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: I am became Death, the destroyers of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
– 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