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
Topics: Technology, Science
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.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Topics: Opportunity
A man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Topics: Mistakes
The optimist thinks this is the best of all worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Topics: Optimism, Realism
The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Topics: Optimism
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
Topics: Perception, Inner-child
No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Topics: Power
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.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Topics: Men, Questions
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.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Topics: Men, Questions
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.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Topics: Science, Physics
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Albert Einstein German-born Theoretical Physicist
- Werner Heisenberg German Theoretical Physicist
- Richard Feynman American Physicist
- Stephen Hawking English Theoretical Physicist
- Freeman Dyson American Physicist, Author
- Niels Bohr Danish Physicist
- Edward Teller American Nuclear Physicist
- Hans Bethe American Physicist
- Howard H. Aiken American Physicist
- Isaac Newton English Physicist
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