J Robert Oppenheimer - Collected Quotes

"A discovery in science, or a new theory, even when it appears most unitary and most all-embracing, deals with some immediate element of novelty or paradox within the framework of far vaster, unanalysed, unarticulated reserves of knowledge, experience, faith, and presupposition. Our progress is narrow; it takes a vast world unchallenged and for granted. This is one reason why, however great the novelty or scope of new discovery, we neither can, nor need, rebuild the house of the mind very rapidly. This is one reason why science, for all its revolutions, is conservative. This is why we will have to accept the fact that no one of us really will ever know very much. This is why we shall have to find comfort in the fact that, taken together, we know more and more." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

 "Despite all the richness of what men have learned about the world of nature, of matter and of space, of change and of life, we carry with us today an image of the giant machine as a sign of what the objective world is really like." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

"Knowledge rests on knowledge; what is new is meaningful because it departs slightly from what was known before; this is a world of frontiers, where even the liveliest of actors or observers will be absent most of the time from most of them." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

"Often the very fact that the words of science are the same as those of our common life and tongues can be more misleading than enlightening, more frustrating to understanding than recognizably technical jargon." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

"The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

"We are not today tempted to search for these keys that unlock the whole of human knowledge and man’s experience. We know that we are ignorant; we are well taught it, and the more surely and deeply we know our own job the better able we are to appreciate the full measure of our pervasive ignorance." (J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

"It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "The Open Mind", 1955) 

"Science is not skepticism. It is not the practice of science to look for things to doubt." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "The Open Mind", 1955) 

"The true responsibility of a scientist, as we all know, is to the integrity and vigor of his science. And because most scientists, like all men of learning, tend in part also to be teachers, they have a responsibility for the communication of the truths they have found. This is at least a collective, if not an individual responsibility. That we should see in this any insurance that the fruits of science will be used for man’s benefit, or denied to man when they make for his distress or destruction, would be a tragic naiveté."  (J Robert Oppenheimer, "The Open Mind", 1955) 

"One thing science can do, and rarely does: it can correct the inherited views that it has by accident at another stage given to common sense, and which turn out to be not true." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "The Growth of Science and the Structure of Culture" , Daedalus, 1958) 

"A change in science, whether novelty or discovery, when properly understood, when the linguistic problem is adequately solved, will even then provide only a hunch, a starting point for looking at an area of experience other than the science in which it was nourished and born." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "The Growth of Science and the Structure of Culture", Daedalus, 1958) 

"Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Reflections on the resonances of physics history" , 1972) 

"The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as the theory." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Reflex", 1977)

"All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Uncommon Sense", 1984)

"The greatest of the changes that science has brought is the acuity of change; the greatest novelty the extent of novelty." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Atom and Void" , 1989)