Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
J. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

"It worked." (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).
J. Robert Oppenheimer

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
J. 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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

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