List of J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

The Greatest Of The Changes That Science Has Brought Is The Acuity Of Change; The Greatest Novelty The Extent Of Novelty.

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.

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.

When All Thermonuclear Sources Of Energy Are Exhausted A Sufficiently Heavy Star Will Collapse. Unless Fission Due To Rotation, The Radiation Of Mass, Or The Blowing Off Of Mass By Radiation, Reduce The Star's Mass To The Order Of That Of The Sun, This Contraction Will Continue Indefinitely.

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.

In The Material Sciences These Are And Have Been, And Are Most Surely Likely To Continue To Be Heroic Days.

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. . .

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.

I Need Physics More Than Friends.

Discovery Follows Discovery, Each Both Raising And Answering Questions, Each Ending A Long Search, And Each Providing The New Instruments For A New Search.

Things Which Stimulate My Curiosity Are Pretty Far Removed From The Practical And Therefore From Classification.

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.