Robert Oppenheimer

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.

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. 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.

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.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up to the top of the mountain. We can see the promised land, but how to get there we do not know.

It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that it is good to learn. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that it is of the highest value to learn. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge and are prepared to take the consequences.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin.

We are not to be saved by technology, we are to be saved by humanity.

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

I feel we have blood on our hands.

The experience of one's own country and of other countries, the experience of men and women, of cities and of the earth, is an experience which can only be had in freedom.

The things that make a man human are also the things that make him dangerous.

We must be prepared to make the effort to understand the world, and to live in it as human beings.

The great thing about science is that it is a way of life that teaches you that you are wrong.

There are no experts in this world, only people who know more than others on specific subjects.

The atomic bomb is a culmination of a hundred years of physics.

It is a matter of profound gravity that the world has changed, and we must change with it.

The scientist is a man who knows how to make things, but he does not know how to live.

We are living in a world which is profoundly new, and profoundly dangerous.

The atomic bomb is a symbol of man's mastery over nature, but also of his potential for self-destruction.