The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist knows it.
Optimism, PessimismRobert OppenheimerThe atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.
Nuclear EnergyRobert OppenheimerAny man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
Robert OppenheimerWhen you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
Robert OppenheimerScientists 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.
Robert OppenheimerIn some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
PhysicsRobert Oppenheimer