Top 100 Kai Bird Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In retrospect, all of his friends noted that he seemed to be wrestling in these years with inner demons. “My feeling about myself,” Oppenheimer later said of this period in his life, “was always one of extreme discontent. I had very little sensitiveness to human beings, very little humility before the realities of this world.”

— Kai Bird

52. “Students felt free to interrupt Oppie with a question. “He generally would answer patiently,” Geurjoy said, “unless the question was manifestly stupid, in which event his response was likely to be quite caustic.”

— Kai Bird

53. “Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.”

— Kai Bird

54. “One day in class, after a particularly difficult lecture, Oppenheimer quipped, “I can make it clearer; I can’t make it simpler.”

— Kai Bird

55. “In his speeches about the Institute, Oppenheimer continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences.”

— Kai Bird

56. “The renowned Danish physicist then asked politely, “How is it going?” Robert replied bluntly, “I’m in difficulties.” Bohr asked, “Are the difficulties mathematical or physical?” When Robert replied, “I don’t know,” Bohr said, “That’s bad.” Bohr.”

— Kai Bird

57. “Oppenheimer’s defeat was also a defeat for American liberalism.”

— Kai Bird

58. “But I have never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives. That this was true of Los Alamos was mainly due to Oppenheimer. He was a leader.”

— Kai Bird

59. “He is doubtless very gifted but completely without mental discipline. He’s outwardly very modest, but inwardly very arrogant.” Ehrenfest’s reply is lost, but Born’s next letter is indicative: “Your information about Oppenheimer was very valuable to me. I know that he is a very fine and decent man, but you can’t help it if someone gets on your nerves.”

— Kai Bird

60. “His coughing was incessant and his weight was down to 115 pounds, skin-and-bones for a man 5 feet 10 inches tall. His energy level never flagged, but he seemed to be literally disappearing little by little, day after day.”

— Kai Bird

61. “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

62. “I had a very exciting time,” Oppenheimer recalled, “reading the Principia with Whitehead, who had forgotten it, so that he was both teacher and student.”

— Kai Bird

63. “A keen observer of people, Cherniss sensed a disconnect in Robert. Here was a man, he thought, who was “very sharp intellectually.” People thought him complicated simply because he was interested in so many things, and knew so much. But on an emotional level, “he wanted to be a simple person, simple in the good sense of the word.” Robert “wanted friends very much,” Cherniss said. And yet, despite his tremendous personal charm, “he didn’t quite know how to make friends.”

— Kai Bird

64. “He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.”

— Kai Bird

65. “Scientists accustomed to working with limited resources and virtually no deadlines now had to adjust to a world of unlimited resources and exacting deadlines.”

— Kai Bird

66. “Echoing his discussion of the previous day with Szilard, Oppenheimer said, “If we were to offer to exchange information before the bomb was actually used, our moral position would be greatly strengthened.”

— Kai Bird

67. “Though he hadn’t a shred of evidence, Hoover now floated the possibility that Oppenheimer intended to defect to the Soviet Union.”

— Kai Bird

68. “Indifference to the sufferings one causes... is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.”

— Kai Bird

69. “The best way to send information,” he explained, “is to wrap it up in a person.”

— Kai Bird

70. “If the recommendations of the Oppenheimer panel had been accepted by the Eisenhower Administration in 1953, the Cold War might have taken a different, less militarized trajectory.”

— Kai Bird

71. “Leo Szilard was frantic. The peripatetic physicist knew time was running out. Atomic bombs would soon be ready, and he expected that they would be used on Japanese cities. Having been the first to urge President Roosevelt to initiate a program to build atomic weapons, he now made repeated attempts to prevent their use.”

— Kai Bird

72. “The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”

— Kai Bird

73. “He had become the simple philosopher king, adored by his ragtag followers of expatriates, retirees, beatniks and natives.”

— Kai Bird

74. “Adler insisted that the answer to anti-Semitism was the global spread of intellectual culture.”

— Kai Bird

75. “General Groves came for dinner at the Chadwicks’ and in the course of casual banter over the dinner table, he said, “You realize of course that the main purpose of this project is to subdue the Russians.” Rotblat was shocked. He had no illusions about Stalin – the Soviet dictator had, after all, invaded his beloved Poland. But thousands of Russians were dying every day on the Eastern Front and Rotblat felt a sense of betrayal.”

— Kai Bird

76. “His deepest fear was that its invention would inspire a deadly nuclear arms race between the West and the Soviet Union. To prevent this, he insisted, it was imperative that the Russians be told about the existence of the bomb project, and be assured that it was no threat to them.”

— Kai Bird

77. “Strauss was unfazed by the extraconstitutional nature of things he was doing to undermine Oppenheimer’s defense.”

— Kai Bird

78. “Albert Einstein’s daughter, Margot, was there to honor the man who had been her father’s boss at the Institute for Advanced Study.”

— Kai Bird

79. “Weinberg, whom Oppenheimer had come to regard as one of his brightest students, observed that mathematical formulas were like temporary hand-holds for a rock-climber. Each hand-hold more or less dictates the position of the next hand-hold. “A record of that,” Weinberg said, “is a record of a particular climb. It gives you very little of the shape of the rock.”

— Kai Bird

80. “But he thought of Einstein as a living patron saint of physics, not a working scientist.”

— Kai Bird

81. “He was frustrated essentially because he wanted to be Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein, and he knew he wasn’t.” Weil.”

— Kai Bird

82. “When I got to Cambridge,” Robert said, “I was faced with the problem of looking at a question to which no one knew the answer – but I wasn’t willing to face it. When I left Cambridge, I didn’t know how to face it very well, but I understood that this was my job; this was the change that occurred that year.”

— Kai Bird

83. “Funny how the mountains always inspire our work.”

— Kai Bird

84. “I do so want you to be able to enjoy life in its best and fullest sense, and you will help me take care of you? To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me. Good-night, dearest.”

— Kai Bird

85. “He told friends that this ancient Hindu text – “The Lord’s Song” – was “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.”

— Kai Bird

86. “He worked for Rockefeller?” Oppenheimer said, puffing on his pipe. And then lowering his voice, he quipped, “I, too, have taken money for doing harm.”

— Kai Bird

87. “He had become the simple philosopher king, adored by his ragtag followers of expatriates, retirees, beatniks and natives. Despite his cultivated aura of otherworldliness, he fit comfortably into their island world. On St. John, the father of the atomic bomb had somehow found just the right refuge from his inner demons.”

— Kai Bird

88. “I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, and war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.”

— Kai Bird

89. “Robert confessed to Fergusson that he had been a “damn fool” and that he probably deserved what had happened to him. Not that he had been guilty of anything, but he had made real mistakes, “like claiming to know things that he didn’t know.” Fergusson thought his friend knew by now that “some of his most depressing mistakes were due to his vanity.” “He was like a wounded animal,” Fergusson recalled. “He retreated. And returned to a simpler way of life.”

— Kai Bird

90. “Stalin had no “master plan” for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947 – suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression.”

— Kai Bird

91. “Here the Army staked out an area eighteen by twenty-four miles in size, evicted a few ranchers by eminent domain and began building a field laboratory and hardened bunkers from which to observe the first explosion of an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer dubbed the test site “Trinity.”

— Kai Bird

92. “This core of enriched uranium, approximately the size of a cantaloupe, would weigh about thirty-three pounds. They could also construct a weapon from the even heavier element of plutonium – produced via a neutron-capture process using U-238. A plutonium bomb would need far less critical mass, and the plutonium core might therefore weigh only eleven pounds and appear no larger than an orange. Either core would need to be packed within a thick shell of ordinary uranium the size of a basketball.”

— Kai Bird

93. “I am very distressed, as I assume you are, over the Oppenheimer matter. I feel that it is somewhat like inquiring into the security risk of a Newton or a Galileo.”

— Kai Bird

94. “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

95. “Although the British Home Office knew all about his communist past, by the spring of 1941 Fuchs was working with Peierls and other British scientists on the highly classified Tube Alloys project. In June 1942, Fuchs received British citizenship – by then, he was already passing information to the Soviets about the British bomb program.”

— Kai Bird

96. “Some of the information in those binders was even manipulated to appear more damaging to Oppenheimer.”

— Kai Bird

97. “Robert often displayed a sense of humor. Upon seeing Karl Compton’s two-year-old daughter pretending to read a small red book – which just happened to be on the topic of birth control – Robert looked over at the very pregnant Mrs. Compton and quipped, “A little late.”

— Kai Bird

98. “Trinity,” the test on July 16, 1945, of the first atomic bomb.”

— Kai Bird

99. “1951, he was shown the Air Force’s strategic war plan – which called for the obliteration of Soviet cities on a scale that shocked him. It was a war plan of criminal genocide.”

— Kai Bird

100. “By the nature of their discipline, mathematicians invariably do their best intuitive work in their twenties or early thirties – whereas historians and other social scientists often need years of studious preparation before they became capable of genuinely creative work.”

— Kai Bird