Oppenheimer Quotes on Science, Morality, and the Weight of Creation

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

You don't get to choose what history remembers you for.

Theory will only take you so far.

I don't know if we can be trusted with such a weapon. But I know the Nazis can't.

The real question is what do we do when we know something that changes everything?

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most were silent.

Physics is not a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.

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

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.

The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin.

Genius sees the answer before it has seen the question.

What we do in secret becomes who we are in public.

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

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.

The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin.

Genius sees the answer before it has seen the question.

What we do in secret becomes who we are in public.

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

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.

The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin.

Genius sees the answer before it has seen the question.

What we do in secret becomes who we are in public.