J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

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.

Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.

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.

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.

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.

It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.

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 assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

We know too much for one man to know too much.

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.

The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.

You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people must unite or they will perish.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

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

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

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

It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.

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

Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.