Quotes from J. Robert Oppenheimer

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.

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

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.

To recruit staff, I traveled all over the country talking with people who had been working on one or another aspect of the atomic-energy enterprise and people in radar work, for example, and underwater sound, telling them about the job, the place that we are going to, and enlisting their enthusiasm.

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

The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.

In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

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.

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

The powerful notion of entropy, which comes from a very special branch of physics … is certainly useful in the study of communication and quite helpful when applied in the theory of language.

Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.

It did not take atomic weapons to make man want peace, a peace that would last. But the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It has made the prospect of future war unendurable.

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.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita…. "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

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.

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.

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

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.N.B.