American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Kai Bird
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end.”
“tea was served every afternoon between three and four in the Common Room on the main floor of Fuld Hall. “Tea is where we explain to each other,” Oppenheimer once said, “what we don’t understand.”
“Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. “Rutherford wouldn’t have me,” Oppenheimer recalled. “He didn’t think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar.”
“Today unemployment and war constitutes [sic] so serious a threat to the well being and security of the members of our society that many are asking whether that society is capable of meeting its most essential obligations. Communists ask much more of society than this: they ask for all men that opportunity, discipline, and freedom which have characterized the high cultures of the past. But we know that today, with the knowledge and power that are ours, no culture which ignores the elementary needs, no culture based on the denial of opportunity, on indifference to human want, can be either honest or fruitful.”
“The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.”
“Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”
“Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.”
“Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.”
“In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy—the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy—had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Afterwards,”
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