J. Robert Oppenheimer

“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.”

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

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

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

“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.”

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.”

“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.”

“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.”

“The best way to send information is to wrap it in a person.”

“There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science.”

“The people of this world must unite or they will perish.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.”

“I need physics more than friends.”