Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

“the imagination to see, the strength to achieve, and an absolutely incorruptible moral integrity’.”
― Ray Monk, Inside The Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Harold F. Cherniss, who was a doctoral student in classics at Berkeley when he met Oppenheimer in 1929, remarked: “The more intimately I was acquainted with him, the less I knew about him.” Oppenheimer, Cherniss thought, “wanted friends very much,” but “he didn’t know how to make friends.” Oppenheimer may not”
― Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

“is an indication of the impact Oppenheimer made on Edsall that the title he chose was one suggested to him by Oppenheimer: The Gad-Fly. This was an allusion to Socrates’s description of himself in Plato’s Apology as a gadfly whose role in society was “to sting people, and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.” Eagerly embracing this image, Edsall, in his editorial for the first issue, published in December 1922, announced:”
― Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

“It is perhaps indicative of how hard it was in Harvard during the 1920s for a Jew—even a Jew as wealthy, as American and as un-Jewish as Oppenheimer—to mix with gentiles that his closest friend at the college was someone”
― Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

“Dirac was not impressed by Oppenheimer’s knowledge of and interest in literature. On the contrary, he rather disapproved of it. Once he remarked to Oppenheimer: “I don’t see how you can work on physics and write poetry at the same time. In science, you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.”
― Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center