Robert Oppenheimer

I can't think that it would be terrible of me to say — and it is occasionally true — that I need physics more than friends.

— Robert Oppenheimer

It worked!

— Robert Oppenheimer

Our own political life is predicated on openness. 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.

— Robert Oppenheimer

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.

— Robert Oppenheimer

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.

— Robert Oppenheimer

The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.

— Robert Oppenheimer

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

— Robert Oppenheimer

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.

— Robert Oppenheimer

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.

— Robert Oppenheimer

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.

— Robert Oppenheimer

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

— Robert Oppenheimer

Well — yes. In modern times, of course.

— Robert Oppenheimer

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.

— Robert Oppenheimer

I can make it clearer; I can't make it simpler.

— Robert Oppenheimer