In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
J. Robert OppenheimerDespite 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 OppenheimerTo try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
J. Robert OppenheimerBoth the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
J. Robert OppenheimerSometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
J. Robert OppenheimerBoth the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.
J. Robert Oppenheimer