109 Quotes by J. Robert Oppenheimer

There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

[About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s]It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.

The experience of seeing how our thought and our words and our ideas have been confined by the limitation of our experience is one which is salutary and is in a certain sense good for a man's morals as well as good for his pleasure. It seems to us [scientists] that this is an opening up of the human spirit , avoiding its provincialism and narrowness.

Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead, who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured'.

sumeBAccess to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

If the radiance of a thousand sunsWere to burst at once into the skyThat would be like the splendour of the Mighty One...I am become Death,The shatterer of worlds.[Quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]