Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
1904–1967 United States
Julius Robert Oppenheimer (22 April 1904 – 18 February 1967) was an American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.
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Also known as: J. R. Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer, J. Robert, Oppenheimer, Robert
Random Robert Oppenheimer quote
29 quotes
There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
The extreme danger to mankind inherent in the proposal [to develop thermonuclear weapons] wholly outweighs any military advantage.
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.
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
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.
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
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.
When I saw how to do it, it was clear to me that one had to at least make the thing.
Our own political life is predicated on openness. We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.
Much has been said of the prospect that man, along with many other forms of life...would disappear as a species. In time, not a long time, that may come to be possible.
Sometimes the elaborate, the learned method, the grown-up method is not as good as the simple and childishly naîve method.
I can make it clearer; I can't make it simpler.
The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that.
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish.
I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of the freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces.
It's 20 years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.
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.
The history of science is rich in the 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.
Science and the Common Understanding (1954)
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.
It's not that I don't feel bad about it. It's just that I don't feel worse today than what I felt yesterday.