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.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)
My childhood 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.
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
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.
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.
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
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.
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 it was with the atomic bomb.
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.