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Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

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
Destroyers
First
Explosion
World
Explosions
Worlds
Bhagavad
Nuclear
Destroyer
Death
Gita
Become
Quoting
Witnessing
Firsts

More quotes by J. Robert Oppenheimer

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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
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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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Truth, not a pet, is man's best friend.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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
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Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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
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It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that it is good to learn... that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge... with anyone who is interested... that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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The people of this world must unite or they will perish.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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
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This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do. . .
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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
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Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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
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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
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Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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