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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
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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
Shall
Happy
Noiselessly
Running
Specification
Trying
Specifications
Adequacy
Machine
Machines
Build
More quotes by 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
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)
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The people of this world must unite or they will perish.
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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
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
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
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
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
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
'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).
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
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
Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.
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
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
J. Robert Oppenheimer