Quotes from J. Robert Oppenheimer

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.

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

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; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

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

If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst at once into the sky That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One... I am become Death, The shatterer of worlds. [ Quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki .]

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.

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

When we deny the EVIL within ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny but of any possibility of dealing with the EVIL of others.

To the confusion of our enemies.

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.

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

There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.

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

Knowledge cannot be pursued without morality.

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

Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead , who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured'.

About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s ] It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.

68. "The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.

Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.

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

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.

The experience of seeing how our thought and our words and our ideas have been confined by the limitation of our experience is one which is salutary and is in a certain sense good for a man's morals as well as good for his pleasure. It seems to us [scientists] that this is an opening up of the human spirit , avoiding its provincialism and narrowness.

Being wealthy might seem to be "supremely enviable," he wrote, but "the business of wealth-getting, and of wealth-enjoyment, when viewed at close range, turns out to be a very different matter.

I would urge the principle of self-limitation in regard to wealth," and he made this "plea to the wealthy": The first step to take, it they would set themselves right, is to live in the midst of superfluous wealth as if they were not the possessors of it; that is, to take for their own use only what they require for the essentials of a civilized life, and to regard the rest as a deposit for the general good, of which they themselves are not to be the beneficiaries.