J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
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Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
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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. ... Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
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Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.
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We knew the world would not be the same.
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In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything.
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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.
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Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.
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It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.
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Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.
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I can make it clearer; I can't make it simpler.
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It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that it is good to learn... that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge... with anyone who is interested... that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity
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Truth, not a pet, is man's best friend.
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I'll never forget his walk; I'll never forget the way he stepped out of the car.... This kind of strut. He had done it.
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A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.
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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 Hiroshima. The people must unite, or they will perish.
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The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
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If we must live with a perpetual sense that the world and the men in it are greater than we and too much for us, let it be the measure of our virtue that we know this and seek no comfort.
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It worked." (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation according to brother, Frank)
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There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.
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The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
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You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human.
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All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.
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Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.