Julius Robert Oppenheimer quotes

“The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

“Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

“There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. ”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

“In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. ”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows. ”

— Julius 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. ”

— Julius 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.”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

“In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

“Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.”

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer