Quotes from J. Robert Oppenheimer

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

I need physics more than friends.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

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

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.

There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.

The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.

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.

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

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

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 of Hiroshima.

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

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.

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

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.

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.

I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.

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.

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.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Truth, not a pet, is man's best friend.

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.