Top 100 Kai Bird Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “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

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

— Kai Bird

53. “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

54. “Japan. “One can only imagine,” Blackett wrote, “the hurry with which the two bombs – the only two existing – were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to insure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.”

— Kai Bird

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— Kai Bird

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

— Kai Bird

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Kai Bird

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Kai Bird

75. “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

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

— Kai Bird

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Kai Bird

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

— Kai Bird

87. “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

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

— Kai Bird

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

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

— Kai Bird

96. “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

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. “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

99. “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

100. “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