I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Genius sees the answer before the question.
The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
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.
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.
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.
When we deny the EVIL within ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny but of any possibility of dealing with the EVIL of others.
We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.
Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.
Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.
The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty.
The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy, error undetected will flourish and subvert.
When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star’s mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.
We know too much for one man to know too much.