109 Quotes by J. Robert Oppenheimer

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

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.

I was born in New York in 1904.

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.

I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.

I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.

In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.