Top 100 Kai Bird Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Kai Bird

61. “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

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

— Kai Bird

63. “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

64. “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

65. “The task of getting rid of Oppenheimer was far too important to leave to the clownish, sensation-seeking senator from Wisconsin. It would require careful planning and skillful maneuvering. After leaving Hoover, Strauss returned to his office and wrote to Senator Robert Taft, urging him to block McCarthy if he attempted to launch an investigation of Oppenheimer. It would be “a mistake,” he wrote. “In the first place some of the evidence will not stand up.”

— Kai Bird

66. “Lawrence’s relentless drive for ever larger and more powerful cyclotrons epitomized the trend toward the kind of “big science” associated with the rise of corporate America in the early twentieth century. Only four industrial laboratories existed in the country in 1890; forty years later there were nearly one thousand such facilities.”

— Kai Bird

67. “Having preached the necessity of international control and openness in 1946, Oppenheimer by 1947 was beginning to accept the idea of a defense posture supported by a multitude of nuclear weapons.”

— Kai Bird

68. “Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. “Rutherford wouldn’t have me,” Oppenheimer recalled. “He didn’t think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar.”

— Kai Bird

69. “Physicists today agree that Oppenheimer’s most stunning and original work was done in the late 1930s on neutron stars – a phenomenon astronomers would not actually be able to observe until 1967.”

— Kai Bird

70. “After receiving his first briefing on nuclear weapons in September 1953, Khrushchev later recalled, “I couldn’t sleep for several days. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons.”

— Kai Bird

71. “He bore a certain “hubris,” she thought, of the kind that carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Everything about Robert’s personality – from his abrupt, jerky way of walking to such little things as the making of a salad dressing – displayed, she thought, “a great need to declare his preeminence.”

— Kai Bird

72. “Over the next year, Fuchs passed detailed written information to the Soviets about the problems and advantages of the implosion-type bomb design over the gun method. He was unaware that the Soviets were getting confirmation of his information from another Los Alamos resident.”

— Kai Bird

73. “They paid more to tap my phone than they paid me to run the Los Alamos Project.”

— Kai Bird

74. “The Air Force did not want Eisenhower exposed to Oppenheimer’s thinking, particularly since his views would support the Army’s demand for a bigger share of the atomic budget.”

— Kai Bird

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

— Kai Bird

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Kai Bird

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Kai Bird

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Kai Bird

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Kai Bird

100. “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