Top 100 Kai Bird Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end.”

— Kai Bird

2. “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

— Kai Bird

3. “The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.”

— Kai Bird

4. “Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.”

— Kai Bird

5. “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.”

— Kai Bird

6. “Adler returned to his father’s Temple Emanu-El in 1873 and preached a sermon on what he called the “Judaism of the Future.” To survive in the modern age, the younger Adler argued, Judaism must renounce its “narrow spirit of exclusion.” Instead of defining themselves by their biblical identity as the “Chosen People,” Jews should distinguish themselves by their social concern and their deeds on behalf of the laboring classes.”

— Kai Bird

7. “Palestinian guerrillas, in a bold and coordinated action, created this newest crisis Sunday, and in doing so they accomplished what they set out to do: they thrust back into the world’s attention a problem diplomats have tended to shunt aside in hesitant steps towards Middle East peace.”

— Kai Bird

8. “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.”

— Kai Bird

9. “Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

— Kai Bird

10. “And only through discipline is it possible “to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror.”

— Kai Bird

11. “The dawn invests our substance with desire And the slow light betrays us, and our wistfulness: When the celestial saffron Is faded and grown colourless, And the sun Gone sterile, and the growing fire Stirs us to waken, We find ourselves again Each in his separate prison Ready, hopeless For negotiation With other men.”

— Kai Bird

12. “March 9–10, 1945, 334 B-29 aircraft dropped tons of jellied gasoline – napalm – and high explosives on Tokyo. The resulting firestorm killed an estimated 100,000 people and completely burned out 15.8 square miles of the city. The fire-bombing raids continued and by July 1945, all but five of Japan’s major cities had been razed and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had been killed. This was total warfare, an attack aimed at the destruction of a nation, not just its military targets.”

— Kai Bird

13. “Oppenheimer argued that concealing information about the bomb increased the danger of misunderstandings.”

— Kai Bird

14. “Wartime compelled some mild-mannered men to contemplate what was once unthinkable.”

— Kai Bird

15. “Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.”

— Kai Bird

16. “Edsall insisted, “Tolstoy is the writer I most enjoy.” “No, no, Dostoyevsky is superior,” Oppenheimer said. “He gets to the soul and torment of man.”

— Kai Bird

17. “Eisenhower understood that Oppenheimer might well be the victim of scurrilous charges. But having ordered an investigation, he was not about to stop the process. Such a move would leave him vulnerable to a charge from McCarthy that the White House was shielding a potential security risk. So, the president sent a formal note to the attorney general, ordering him “to place a blank wall” between Oppenheimer and classified material.”

— Kai Bird

18. “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life,” he asked, but “which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”

— Kai Bird

19. “He was always very kind and considerate to anybody below him,” recalled Harold Cherniss. “But not at all to people who might be considered his intellectual equals. And this, of course, irritated people, made people very angry, and made him enemies.” Wendell.”

— Kai Bird

20. “How can you do both? In physics we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” Flattered, Robert just laughed.”

— Kai Bird

21. “His physics was good, but his arithmetic awful.”

— Kai Bird

22. “To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me.”

— Kai Bird

23. “It is easy for a famous scientist to have lots of students doing the dirty work for him,” said one colleague. “But Opje helps people with their problems and then gives them the credit.”

— Kai Bird

24. “The government paid far more to tap my telephone than they ever paid me at Los Alamos.”

— Kai Bird

25. “By the age of twelve, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known local geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park. Not aware of his youth, one of these correspondents nominated Robert for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and soon thereafter a letter arrived inviting him to deliver a lecture before the club.”

— Kai Bird

26. “We were all close to communism at the time,” Bohm recalled. Actually, until 1940–41, Bohm didn’t have much sympathy for the Communist Party. But then, with the collapse of France, it seemed to him that no one but the communists had the will to resist the Nazis. Indeed, many Europeans appeared to prefer the Nazis to the Russians.”

— Kai Bird

27. “Thereafter, the Gibneys and the Oppenheimers had nothing to do with each other. They hired lawyers and squabbled over beach rights. The feud became a legend on the island.”

— Kai Bird

28. “His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.”

— Kai Bird

29. “Oppenheimer – and surely many others in the room – understood that they could not rush to “stay ahead” in atomic weapons without pushing the Russians into an arms race with the United States.”

— Kai Bird

30. “What would happen to a country found to be building nuclear weapons? Baruch thought a stockpile of nuclear weapons should be set aside and automatically used against any country found in violation. He called this “condign punishment.”

— Kai Bird

31. “His informality contrasted sharply with the manner of General Groves, who “demanded attention, demanded respect.” Oppie, on the other hand, got attention and respect naturally.”

— Kai Bird

32. “This was, I think, the secret of his attraction for women. I mean, it felt almost that he could read their minds – many women have said this to me. Women at Los Alamos who were pregnant could say, ‘The only one who would understand was Robert.’ He had a really almost saintly empathy for people.”

— Kai Bird

33. “The bottom line is that Robert always wished to be, and was, free to think for himself and to make his own political choices. Commitments have to be put in perspective to be understood, and the failure to do that was the most damaging characteristic of the McCarthy period. The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.”

— Kai Bird

34. “Though “present at the creation” of this militarization of science, Oppenheimer had walked away from Los Alamos, and Einstein respected him for attempting to use his influence to put the brakes on the arms race.”

— Kai Bird

35. “Every day the Army bused in Pueblo Indian women from the nearby settlement of San Ildefonso to work as housekeepers.”

— Kai Bird

36. “He was an idea man,” recalled Phillips. “He never did any great physics, but look at all the lovely ideas that he worked out with his students.”

— Kai Bird

37. “Reading it in the evening by flashlight during his walking tour of Corsica, he later claimed to his Berkeley friend Haakon Chevalier, was one of the great experiences of his life. It snapped him out of his depression.”

— Kai Bird

38. “Einstein’s instincts were right – and time would demonstrate that Oppenheimer’s were wrong. “Oppenheimer is not a gypsy like me,” Einstein confided to his close friend Johanna Fantova. “I was born with the skin of an elephant; there is no one who can hurt me.” Oppenheimer, he thought, clearly was a man who was easily hurt – and intimidated.”

— Kai Bird

39. “Many scientists felt the “Mike” test demonstrated that the government simply had no intention of listening to their expert advice.”

— Kai Bird

40. “Increasingly alarmed by the development of what President Eisenhower would someday call the “military-industrial complex,” Oppenheimer had tried to use his celebrity status to question the scientific community’s increasing dependency on the military. In 1954, he lost.”

— Kai Bird

41. “Oppenheimer decided to import the entire Princeton team of twenty scientists to Los Alamos. This turned out to be a particularly serendipitous decision, as the Princeton group included not only Robert Wilson but a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous twenty-four-year-old physicist named Richard Feynman.”

— Kai Bird

42. “He wanted to be on good terms with the Washington generals,” Dyson observed, “and to be a savior of humanity at the same time.”

— Kai Bird

43. “Green firmly believed that something untoward was happening, especially after he learned that Strauss subsequently transferred a lot of his legal business to Zuckert. Green didn’t know it, but Zuckert also signed a contract with Strauss to serve as the latter’s “personal adviser and consultant.”

— Kai Bird

44. “That summer of 1928, Robert was also reading the 1922 novel The Enormous Room, an account by e. e. cummings of his four-month incarceration in a French wartime prison camp. He loved cummings’ notion that a man stripped of all his possessions can nevertheless find personal freedom in the most spartan of surroundings. The story would take on a new meaning for him after 1954.”

— Kai Bird

45. “This the United States will never do; and let me point out that we never had any of this hysterical fear of any nation until atomic weapons appeared upon the scene.” Later in his presidency, Eisenhower would feel compelled to rebuke a panel of hawkish advisers, caustically observing, “You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”

— Kai Bird

46. “He reminded MacLeish of the “profound part that culture and society play in the very definition of human values, human salvation and liberation.” Therefore, “I think that what is needed is something far subtler than the emancipation of the individual from society; it involves, with an awareness that the past one hundred and fifty years have rendered progressively more acute, the basic dependence of man on his fellows.”

— Kai Bird

47. “Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature.”

— Kai Bird

48. “I found Bridgman a wonderful teacher,” Oppenheimer remembered, “because he never really was quite reconciled to things being the way they were and he always thought them out.”

— Kai Bird

49. “Oppie told his audience that he was not going to argue with the president’s motives and aims – but “we are 140 million people, and there are two billion people living on earth.” However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.”

— Kai Bird

50. “Teller would pay dearly for what he had said. Later that summer, on a visit to Los Alamos, Teller spotted an old friend, Bob Christy, in the dining hall. Walking over to greet him with outstretched hand, Teller was stunned when Christy refused to shake hands and abruptly turned his back. Standing close by was a furious Rabi, who said, “I won’t shake your hand, either, Edward.” Stunned, Teller went back to his hotel room and packed his bags.”

— Kai Bird