J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

American - Physicist April 22, 1904 - February 18, 1967

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Future War Mountain Country

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Childhood Me World Things

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Death I Am Become Am Worlds

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Success Sweet You Way

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Time War World New

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Science Freedom Place Free

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Science Truth Deep Find

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Man Years Ten Years Quite Errors

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Science Truth Deep Find

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Man Escape Without Little

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Best True Possible Pessimist Thinks

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Life Depression Men Community

I was born in New York in 1904.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

New York Born New I Was Born

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

World Will Must Unite

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Science Man Live Action

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Work Live Men Problem

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Beautiful Science Everything Very

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Life Me My Life Child

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Happy Try Run Build

I need physics more than friends.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Friends Physics Need More

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Children Problems Long Perception

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Privilege May Over Greatest

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Work People Job Place

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Germany Jews About Fury

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Days Most Been Continue

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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Spring Marriage Think Friends

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Richard P. Feynman

Lawrence M. Krauss

Austin O'Malley

Murray Gell-Mann

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