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.
A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality.
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.
When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it.
There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
The history of science is rich in example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.
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.
Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and – to go a step further – our mathematicians do not know mathematics.