Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To the confusion of our enemies.
I need physics more than friends.
Truth, not a pet, is man's best friend.
I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Genius sees the answer before the question.
We know too much for one man to know too much.
A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.
The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century.
The people of this world must unite or they will perish.
The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.
'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).
The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.
When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it.
No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.
I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.
The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.
My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.
Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.
Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.
Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.
We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)
The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.
I can't think that it would be terrible of me to say - and it is occasionally true - that I need physics more than friends.
You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human.
There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.
In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything
Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.
It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.
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.