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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
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
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Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
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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
Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.
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
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
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
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
'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).
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
The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
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
To the confusion of our enemies.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.
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
Truth, not a pet, is man's best friend.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
