Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.
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.
Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.
The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
If we must live with a perpetual sense that the world and the men in it are greater than we and too much for us, let it be the measure of our virtue that we know this and seek no comfort.
I need physics more than friends.
In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.
To the confusion of our enemies.
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people must unite, or they will perish.
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.
All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.
It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.
My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.
When you see something technically sweet you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it, only after you have achieved success.
I would urge the principle of self-limitation in regard to wealth,” and he made this “plea to the wealthy”: The first step to take, it they would set themselves right, is to live in the midst of superfluous wealth as if they were not the possessors of it; that is, to take for their own use only what they require for the essentials of a civilized life, and to regard the rest as a deposit for the general good, of which they themselves are not to be the beneficiaries.
Being wealthy might seem to be “supremely enviable,” he wrote, but “the business of wealth-getting, and of wealth-enjoyment, when viewed at close range, turns out to be a very different matter.