“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.”

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

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

“Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.”

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

“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.”

“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. ”

“This world of ours is a new world in which the unit of knowledge the nature of human communities the order of society the order of ideas the very notions of society and culture have changed and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new not because it has never been there before but because it has changed in quality.”