J. Robert Oppenheimer

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation.

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

I was born in New York in 1904.

I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

To recruit staff, I traveled all over the country talking with people who had been working on one or another aspect of the atomic-energy enterprise and people in radar work, for example, and underwater sound, telling them about the job, the place that we are going to, and enlisting their enthusiasm.

The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.