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“The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“The reason Dick's physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations. The usual theoretical physics was done since the time of Newton was to begin by writing down some equations and then to work hard calculating solutions of the equations. This was the way Hans and Oppy and Julian Schwinger did physics. Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the picture gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation. It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial.”
― Freeman Dyson

“…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.”
― Lydia Millet, Oh Pure And Radiant Heart

“The worst lie ever told is that it is easier to destroy than to create. This lie makes people apathetic about a number of imminently avoidable horrors, particularly the nuclear ones. But Oppenheimer didn’t just go outside one day and trip over an atomic bomb. Nuclear development required trillions of dollars and a massive sustained effort by America’s top politicians, military advisors, and scientific geniuses. Not one damn bit of it was easy. It was certainly harder that sitting down with Stalin or Khrushchev and having a talk . . .
America had options. The path of destruction was a choice. It has always been America’s choice, and we citizens have always shrugged, assuming it’s too late to turn back the doomsday clock, although we’re the ones who wound it in the first place.”
― Israel Morrow, Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion

“Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.”
― Lydia Millet, Oh Pure And Radiant Heart

“Oppenheimer, haunted by his leading role in the first use of atomic weapons, understood only one aspect of prudence. His longing not to do evil himself blinded him to the need to ward off the evil of others. This painfully knotted man hoped with one swipe of his moral sword to rid himself of the impossible tangle and to be clear and simple for once in his life. But being Oppenheimer could never be as easy as that.

For Oppenheimer embodied two of the highest human types, the theoretical man described by Aristotle as god-like for living in the mind, among changeless truths, and the paragon of Machiavellian virtue, god-like in commanding the power of life and death over other men. No theoretical man before Oppenheimer had known such lordly power. In certain high moments he approached that Aristotelian theoretical purity which lives for the joys of knowing the world, whatever it might prove to be; in another light he thrilled at that Machiavellian power and its attendant renown; in contrary moods he reviled himself for the suffering he brought into the world, and ached to renounce his distinction and to be merely another man among men. Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one’s mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. Oppenheimer’s agony tore him open from top to bottom.”
― Algis Valiunas

“Robert Oppenheimer used to tell of the pioneer mysteries of building reliable Geiger counters that had low background noise. Among his friends, he said, there were two schools of thought. One school firmly held that the final step before one sealed off the Geiger tube was to peel a banana and wave the skin three times, sharply to the left.
The other school was equally confident that success would follow if one waved the banana peel twice to the left and then, once, smartly to the right. (My counters were unbelievably bad because I didn't use either of these techniques.)”
― Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez

“As their conversation turned philosophical, Oppenheimer stressed the word 'responsibility'. And when Morgan suggested he was using the word almost in a religious sense Oppenheimer agreed it was a 'secular devise for using a religious notion without attaching it to a transcendent being. I like to use the word 'ethical' here. I am more explicit about ethical questions now than ever before although these were very strong with me when I was working on the bomb. Now I don't know how to describe my life without using some word like responsibility to characterize it. A word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I'm not talking about knowledge but about being limited by what you can do. There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself but increased knowledge, increased wealth... leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable. After this soliloquy Morgan wrote "Oppenheimer turned his palms up, the long slender fingers including his listener in his conclusion 'You and I' he said 'Neither of us is rich but as far as responsibility goes both of us are in a position right now to alleviate the most awful agony in people at the starvation level.' This was only a different way of saying what he had learned from reading Proust forty years earlier in Corsica... that indifference to the sufferings one causes is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty. Far from being indifferent, Robert was acutely aware of the suffering he had caused others in his life and yet he would not allow himself to succumb to guilt. He would accept responsibility. He had never tried to deny his responsibility but since the security hearing he nevertheless no longer seemed to have the capacity or motivation to fight against the cruelty of indifference. and in that sense, Robby had been right- they achieved their goal, they killed him.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“You have to take the whole story." Rabi insisted. "That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man; what made him act, what he did and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here- you are writing a man's life.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,â€� as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb â€� a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki â€� brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.”
― Algis Valiunas

“J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’—the boundary of the unknown.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry, and then diplomacy, and now it's economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful could not, after 40 years, compose our identity?”
― E. L. Doctorow

“We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry, and then diplomacy, and now it's our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful could not, after 40 years, compose our identity?”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Even Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, was a believer of Bhagwat Gita and quoted the Shloka 32 (Chapter 11) that actual meant, "Time I am; destroyer of the worlds." whereas he mis-translated TIME as DEATH.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Krishna Crux

“When the first atomic bomb was exploded successfully, Oppenheimer and Fermi flashed the code word: Baby satisfactorily born. A most befitting yell o triumph for the coming of age of technological civilization and for the death of culture. Since then hundreds of thousands of babies were satisfactorily born with defective genes or died of leukemia brought on by radiation. Compulsive creation, genius, what the hell do you want, clap censorship on science?”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Morally speaking, the fathers of the hydrogen bomb had nothing to do with the latter. They were cracking not ethics, not culture, not our soul, but a scientific and technological problem.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“This was however NOT the scientist’s responsibility. Morally speaking, the fathers of the hydrogen bomb had nothing to do with the latter. They were cracking not ethics, not culture, not our soul, but a scientific and technological problem.”
― Romain Gary

“¡Qué ben, que a bomba ven co seu rebombio!
A bomba, ¡bong!, a bomba, bon amigo,
A bomba con aramios, con formigas,
con fornos pra asar meniños loiros.
A bomba ten lombrices, bombardinos,
vermes de luz, bombillas fluorescentes,
peixes de chumbo, vómitos, anémonas,
estrelas de plutonio plutocrático,
esterco de cobalto hidroxenado,
martelos, ferraduras, matarratos.

A bomba, bong. A bomba, bon amigo.
Con átomos que estoupan en cadeia
e creban as cadeias que nos atan:

Os outos edificios.
Os outos funcionarios.
Os outos fiñanceiros.
Os outos ideais.
¡Todo será borralla radioaitiva!

As estúpidas nais que pairen fillos
polvo serán, mais polvo namorado.

Os estúpidos pais, as prostitutas,
as grandes damas da beneficencia,
magnates e mangantes, grandes cruces,
altezas, escelencias, eminencias,
cabaleiros cubertos, descubertos,
nada serán meu ben, si a bomba ven,
nada o amor, e nada a morte morta
con bendiciós e plenas indulxencias.

¡Qué ben, que a bomba ven! Nun instantiño
amable primavera faise cinza
de vagos isotopos placentarios,
de letales surrisas derretidas
baixo un arco de átomos triunfaes.

A bomba, ¡bong! a bomba co seu bombo
de setas e volutas abombadas,
axiña ven, vela ahí ven, bon amigo.

¡Estános ben! ¡Está ben! ¡Está bon!

¡¡¡µþ´Ç´Ç´Ç²Ô²µ!!!&°ù»å±ç³Ü´Ç;
― Celso Emilio Ferreiro, O Soño Sulagado