J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. 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.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

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

When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it.

Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.

In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything

A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.

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

The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do. . .

To the confusion of our enemies.

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.

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.

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

The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.

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.