Quotes & Sayings About Oppenheimer

This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do ... — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black. — Harry Oppenheimer

The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

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. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Millions of Indonesians who live with secrets in their family who have a sense of that kind of secret that their parents never told them, want to be told about what happened so they can know where they come from. — Joshua Oppenheimer

I think 'The Act of Killing' forced people to look at the problem, but the problem is actually a state run by thugs, or a shadow state, a part of the state that's run by thugs, and a military that enjoys complete legal - not just impunity, but immunity. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer's agony tore him open from top to bottom. More important than any political dispute his biographers may hope to re-animate or even to settle is a sense of that agony: what it means to be a man desiring scientific and political and moral greatness and living out the crucial ideas and struggles of our time, which pierce like knives, and rend the flesh and the spirit, and allow not a moment's relief. — Algis Valiunas

Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I am an African. I live there and my children live there, and as far as I understand, they intend to go on living there. — Nicky Oppenheimer

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I am one of the affluent rich living the good life. But I like to think that I am doing my bit to resolve the problems of Africa and am certainly committed to Africa in the long run. — Nicky Oppenheimer

I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Testimony always comes from people who are in some way disempowered. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Diamonds are a key component in the campaign to make poverty history. — Nicky Oppenheimer

'The Look of Silence' is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It's distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience? — Joshua Oppenheimer

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead, who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured'. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose, but that's not why people do it normally. — Frank Oppenheimer

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. 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

For a long time, the Indonesian government ignored 'The Act of Killing,' hoping it would go away. — Joshua Oppenheimer

We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition. — Joshua Oppenheimer

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

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 of Hiroshima. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I need physics more than friends. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

The killers have built the society. The whole Indonesia is their platform. They run the country. They run the country. — Joshua Oppenheimer

We have to support truth and reconciliation and some form of justice. — Joshua Oppenheimer

There are committed Indonesian filmmakers who are committed supporters of 'The Act Of Killing.' — Joshua Oppenheimer

For me, I'm a filmmaker because, above all, I'm an explorer. It's my way of exploring and investigating the problems, the questions, and the mysteries about what it means to be human that vex me most, that keep me up at night, and that, when I finally fall asleep, insinuate themselves into my dreams. — Joshua Oppenheimer

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take. — Joshua Oppenheimer

The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

A sour view of things, I grant you; but one borne out by the history of our age and of the age to come, when Trinity--not the Christians' but Oppenheimer's--will turn Alamogordo sand to glass. In the future, dead cities will molder behind rusting thorns no prince can ever penetrate; dirty bombs will engender tribes of lepers--not by germs, but by deadly atoms; and radioactive isotopes will be left to cool for an age or more, sealed in burial chambers with a pharaoh's curse. — Norman Lock

I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man. — Franz Oppenheimer

'The Act of Killing' helped catalyze this basic transformation in how the media talks about the past. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Like many children of the rich and famous, Paris Hilton didn't always get to spend quality time with her parents, especially her mother. A socially ambitious young woman, Kathleen Elizabeth Avanzino Richards Hilton, who had married into the celebrated Hilton Hotel family, was often out and about. — Jerry Oppenheimer

I think Americans are aware that they are involved in all sorts of violence around the world. They normally don't want to look at that. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Certainly the party counts a considerable number of intellectuals among its members, but I am by no means disposed to apologise for that. — Harry Oppenheimer

Military rule in Indonesia formally ended in 1998, but the army remains above the law. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands. — Michael Oppenheimer

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

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. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths. — Joshua Oppenheimer

My first memory of cinema is my mother taking me to see 'Silkwood,' which is about a whistleblower at a nuclear power plant. — Joshua Oppenheimer

We know too much for one man to know too much. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Kimberley Process is not a perfect construct, and it is necessary now to re-double efforts to address its remaining shortcomings and strengthen its provisions. — Nicky Oppenheimer

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction. — Joshua Oppenheimer

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior. — Joshua Oppenheimer

'It worked.' (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation). — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Trinity's witnesses responded just as those to Apollo 11 would, as J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." Oppenheimer later said the he beheld his radiant blooming cloud and thought of Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Aloud, however, the physicist made the ultimate engineer comment: "It worked. — Craig Nelson

In the history of science it happens not infrequently that a reductionist approach leads to a spectacular success. Frequently the understanding of a complicated system as a whole is impossible without an understanding of its component parts. And sometimes the understanding of a whole field of science is suddenly advanced by the discover of a single basic equation. Thus it happened that the Schrodinger equation in 1926 and the Dirac equation in 1927 brought a miraculous order into the previously mysterious processes of atomic physics. The equations of Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac were triumphs of reductionism. Bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols. These triumphs were in Oppenheimer's mind when he belittled his own discovery of black holes. Compared with the abstract beauty and simplicity of the Dirac equation, the black hole solution seemed to him ugly, complicated, and lacking in fundamental significance. — Freeman Dyson

Oppenheimer, The State, p. 15: What, then, is the State as a sociological concept? The State, completely in its genesis ... is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group of men on a defeated group, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors. And — Murray N. Rothbard

In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general. — Joshua Oppenheimer

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

You can get a diamond which is worth 10 cents; you can get a diamond of exactly the same size, which is worth a hundred dollars. — Nicky Oppenheimer

There are two things that people [are surrounded by and] avoid trying to understand. One is music, and the other is electricity. — Frank Oppenheimer

The army taught me to sign my name very quickly, and that's stood me in good stead the rest of my life. — Nicky Oppenheimer

I never accepted Communist dogma or theory. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Dirac politely refused Robert's [Robert Oppenheimer] two proffered books: reading books, the Cambridge theoretician announced gravely, "interfered with thought." — Luis Walter Alvarez

when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing - a very bad, an execrable drawing - of a bomb. — Richard Rhodes

Indonesia can hold regular elections, but if the laws do not apply to the most powerful elements in society, then there is no rule of law and no genuine democracy. The country will never become a true democracy until it takes serious steps to end impunity. — Joshua Oppenheimer

I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the 'economic means' for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the 'political means'. — Franz Oppenheimer

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful. — Joshua Oppenheimer

May I suggest that people in many African countries could be suffering from donation fatigue? — Nicky Oppenheimer

Yes, it was difficult - making 'The Act of Killing' in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity. — Joshua Oppenheimer

No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Submit an agreement providing for the peaceful absorbtion of a celestial races in such a manner that our culture would remain intact with guarantee that their presence not be revealed." "One must consider the fact that mis-identification of these space craft for a intercontinental missile in a re-entry phase of flight could lead to accidental nuclear war with horrible consequences. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

The best way to learn is to teach — Frank Oppenheimer

We all need to become more customer-focused and recognize the power of marketing to sell more diamonds. — Nicky Oppenheimer

In Denmark, the annual Christmas party is probably the most important cultural institution in the country. — Joshua 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

His in-laws, Erastus and Eloise Oppenheimer, lived in Ezra, Texas, a town tucked so deep in the woods of East Texas that time, civil rights, and wireless Internet couldn't find it. — Sharon Bayliss

For the first few weeks in Santa Fe, Oppenheimer and his key staff worked out of the office at 109 East Palace Avenue in the early mornings and made daily trips up to Los Alamos to inspect the progress of the construction. "The laboratories at the site were in a sketchy state, but that did not deter the workers," Dorothy wrote of those hectic early days. "In the morning buses, consisting of station wagons, sedans, or trucks, would leave 109 and pick up the men at the ranches and take them up the Hill. Occasionally, a driver would forget to stop at one or another of the ranches and the stranded and frustrated scientists would call in a white heat. — Jennet Conant

The history of this nation up through the Civil War shows how difficult the establishment of a federal authority can be when there are profound differences in the values of the societies it attempts to integrate."3 Oppenheimer thus became the first of many postwar realists to disparage Einstein for being allegedly too idealistic. — Walter Isaacson

I don't think Africa gets as much credit as it should have on the world stage. People tend to think of us as coming from The Dark Continent, where nothing good goes on. That's not true. A huge amount of, as I say, entrepreneurship goes on. — Nicky Oppenheimer

The most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I think for a while now people have been scared to be out of TMT the commonly used acronym for technology-media-telecom stocks, which have tended to rise in tandem recently and the feeling has really been you have to be there ... but now we're getting a dose of reality. — Peter Oppenheimer

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful. — Joshua Oppenheimer

I came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union. — Joshua Oppenheimer

After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they went through a real Renaissance where military dictatorship took over. — Joshua Oppenheimer

For my part, as a filmmaker, I've never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it's a lie. — Joshua Oppenheimer

In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I am always a little surprised when anyone sees anything I make, so being nominated for the Oscar is beyond amazing - what a tremendous honor. — Joshua Oppenheimer

There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

I was born in New York in 1904. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. — Michael Oppenheimer

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself. — Joshua Oppenheimer

I don't like to eat when I watch films because it distracts me. Anything crunchy or in a wrapper is terrible. — Joshua Oppenheimer

The diamond business has always been secretive. — Nicky Oppenheimer

Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course accept those invitations because I could document what happened that way. — Joshua Oppenheimer

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows. — J. Robert Oppenheimer