J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

The experience of seeing how our thought and our words and our ideas have been confined by the limitation of our experience is one which is salutary and is in a certain sense good for a man's morals as well as good for his pleasure. It seems to us [scientists] that this is an opening up of the human spirit , avoiding its provincialism and narrowness.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

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.

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

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

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.

This world of ours is a new world in which the unit of knowledge the nature of human communities the order of society the order of ideas the very notions of society and culture have changed and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new not because it has never been there before but because it has changed in quality.

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

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