J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
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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.
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To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.
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I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.
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The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.
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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.
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I was born in New York in 1904.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.
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We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy, error undetected will flourish and subvert.
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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.
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There must be no barriers for 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.
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Genius sees the answer before the question.
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We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. 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.
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My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.
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When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.
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It's not that I don't feel bad about it. It's just that I don't feel worse today than what I felt yesterday.
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The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.
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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.
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The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance - these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.
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The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.
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There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
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Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics.