Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.

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.

This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he...

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

We knew the world would not be the same.

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

Doctor Atomic

In 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.

[Adams and Sellars show us its seductive horror, the painful dilemma that no amount of hindsight can assuage.] Lord, … these affairs are hard on the heart.

I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car…. This kind of strut. He had done it.

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

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

“It worked.” (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation according to brother, Frank)

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.

The 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.

When 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...

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

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

There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any asssertion, to seek...

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance – these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and...