Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tat lock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

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.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

Now, I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer

Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-gītā after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

— J. Robert Oppenheimer