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.

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 inquire. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

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

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.

'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).