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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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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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Discovery
Transmuted
Today
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Shatter
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More quotes by J. Robert Oppenheimer

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To the confusion of our enemies.
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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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
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There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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
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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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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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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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The people of this world must unite or they will perish.
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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Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
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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'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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
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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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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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Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer