Top 60 J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

Featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes, Epic Quotes, Quotes About War, Quotes About Civilization

2. “Genius sees the answer before the question.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

Featured in: Smart Quotes, Genius Quotes

3. “I need physics more than friends.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

4. “Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

7. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

8. “The people of this world must unite or they will perish.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

9. “Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

10. “We know too much for one man to know too much.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

11. “Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

12. “We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

13. “We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

14. “To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

15. “A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

16. “It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

17. “No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

18. “Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

19. “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

20. “The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

21. “There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

22. “When we deny the EVIL within ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny but of any possibility of dealing with the EVIL of others.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

23. “To the confusion of our enemies.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

24. “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.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

25. “When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

26. “In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

27. “Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

28. “You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what’s left will be human.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

29. “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.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

30. “Truth, not a pet, is man’s best friend.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

32. “Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

33. “The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

34. “Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

35. “The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance-these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

36. “Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

38. “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

39. “There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

40. “We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

41. “The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

42. “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.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

43. “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

44. “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people must unite, or they will perish.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

45. “We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

46. “If we must live with a perpetual sense that the world and the men in it are greater than we and too much for us, let it be the measure of our virtue that we know this and seek no comfort.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

47. “In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

48. “The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

49. “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.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

50. “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer