J Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable.

The atomic bomb had more effect on the thinking of government leaders than it had on the thoughts of scientists.

In the laboratory, we counted everything. We learned that, in science, truth counts less than what people believe.

Success often comes to those who dare to act. It seldom goes to the timid.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful.

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.

The door to the future was there. It was a golden door.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

The world will not be the same.

Science is the greatest of all adventure stories.

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.

J Robert Oppenheimer Quotes part 2

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, the freedom that is the essence of human life, of the human spirit, will live on.

The whole world was lighted by a searing light of the explosion.

Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.

The theoretical broadening, which, starting from the researches of Einstein, has spread to all branches of physics, has not only enriched the expanse of knowledge, but has also profoundly influenced the philosophical way of thinking.

The duty of a scientific laboratory experiment to complete is never exactly the same thing as the duty of a citizen.

What are the optimal conditions for the occurrence of exactly one world war?

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

Do not let yourself be frightened by the knowledge – however horrifying it may be – that you can no longer regard any of the members of your race as essentially different from the beasts.

The profoundest threat to freedom is the infinite subtlety and endless reflexiveness of the human mind.

The men who have devised the most terrible of weapons have been guided not by sinister design, but by the urge to serve their country.

It is even possible that the course of human history has been determined by the expiration dates of laboratories.

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.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable.

It is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand.

I love the irony of overcoming the impossible.

Science has brought us power and power has brought us consequences.

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry… There is no place for dogma in science.

In the twenty-first century, the development of technology will more and more increasingly be in the hands of the military and scientific-industrial complexes.

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.

For me and my contemporaries, the war was a total experience that coloured our philosophy for the rest of our lives.

To believe that new weapons can be invented, the human mind must be free to speculate and imagine, to rule out diplomacy, and resort to war.

The essence of science is that it can free a man from his own limitations.

I am disturbingly vain.

In the long term, radiation death is not at all our problem.

It was a time and place when nothing was normal and everything was possible.

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

Great crises bring great men, and creatures of lesser character acquiesce in their manipulations.

The atomic bombs completely discredited the philosophy of science that I was taught.

Oppenheimer’s hope, at this point and with this barren and bleak history in view, that he not take full responsibility for the development of the atomic bomb was denounced as ‘political insanity’ and ‘a dangerous delusion.’