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The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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J. Robert Oppenheimer
Age: 62 †
Born: 1904
Born: April 22
Died: 1967
Died: February 18
Art Collector
Engineer
Nuclear Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
University Teacher
New York City
New York
Julius Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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More quotes by J. Robert Oppenheimer
Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no' if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no' if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no' if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no'.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The history of science is rich in 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
If we must live with a perpetual sense that the world and the men in it are greater than we and too much for us, let it be the measure of our virtue that we know this and seek no comfort.
J. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
J. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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
'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).
J. Robert Oppenheimer
You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human.
J. 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.
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.
J. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment and only so can we know peace.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
