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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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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
World
Intentions
Secrets
Intention
Thoughts
Secret
Nature
Men

More quotes by 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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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
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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 physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.
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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To the confusion of our enemies.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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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
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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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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