Quotes from Kai Bird

Scientists aren't responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it's God. He put the facts there.

Oppenheimer's warnings were ignored—and ultimately, he was silenced. Like that rebellious Greek god Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it upon humankind, Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire. But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of its terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him.

As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer's ordeal signified that the postwar "messianic role of the scientists" was now at an end.

The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.

Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.

Oppenheimer decided to import the entire Princeton team of twenty scientists to Los Alamos. This turned out to be a particularly serendipitous decision, as the Princeton group included not only Robert Wilson but a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous twenty-four-year-old physicist named Richard Feynman.

He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.

How can you do both? In physics we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite." Flattered, Robert just laughed.

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. "Rutherford wouldn't have me," Oppenheimer recalled. "He didn't think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar.

tea was served every afternoon between three and four in the Common Room on the main floor of Fuld Hall. "Tea is where we explain to each other," Oppenheimer once said, "what we don't understand.

One day in class, after a particularly difficult lecture, Oppenheimer quipped, "I can make it clearer; I can't make it simpler.

I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, and war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

Later in his presidency, Eisenhower would feel compelled to rebuke a panel of hawkish advisers, caustically observing, "You can't have this kind of war. There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.

Oppenheimer's defeat was also a defeat for American liberalism.

Wartime compelled some mild-mannered men to contemplate what was once unthinkable

One can't live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors.

Although I went to college in the United States - Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota - I returned to the Middle East for a year in 1970-71 to study at the American University of Beirut.

Most Americans have no memory of the designs Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers had for postwar-American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination and an end to European colonization in the developing world, nuclear disarmament, international law, the World Court, the United Nations - these were all ideas of the progressive left.

The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as 'the Jewish state.'

I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv.

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.