Top 100 Kai Bird Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Kai Bird

58. “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

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

— Kai Bird

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Kai Bird

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Kai Bird

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Kai Bird

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Kai Bird

84. “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

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

— Kai Bird

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Kai Bird

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Kai Bird

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

— Kai Bird

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

— Kai Bird

97. “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

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

— Kai Bird

99. “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

100. “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