The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“According to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was informed of the existence of the bomb at the Potsdam Conference in July, he told Stimson he thought an atomic bombing was unnecessary because “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” (American Prometheus Quotes)
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“By the nature of their discipline, mathematicians invariably do their best intuitive work in their twenties or early thirties—whereas historians and other social scientists often need years of studious preparation before they became capable of genuinely creative work.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“He was frustrated essentially because he wanted to be Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein, and he knew he wasn’t.” Weil”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.” And only through discipline is it possible “to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“In less than fifteen minutes he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked.” (American Prometheus Quotes)
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Indifference to the sufferings one causes… is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Oppenheimer’s defeat was also a defeat for American liberalism.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Oppenheimer’s warnings were ignored—and ultimately, he was silenced. Like that rebellious Greek god Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it upon humankind, Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire. But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of its terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Oppie told his audience that he was not going to argue with the president’s motives and aims—but “we are 140 million people, and there are two billion people living on earth.” However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Physicists today agree that Oppenheimer’s most stunning and original work was done in the late 1930s on neutron stars—a phenomenon astronomers would not actually be able to observe until 1967.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Scientists accustomed to working with limited resources and virtually no deadlines now had to adjust to a world of unlimited resources and exacting deadlines.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.” (American Prometheus Quotes)
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“They paid more to tap my phone than they paid me to run the Los Alamos Project”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“This was, I think, the secret of his attraction for women. I mean, it felt almost that he could read their minds—many women have said this to me. Women at Los Alamos who were pregnant could say, ‘The only one who would understand was Robert.’ He had a really almost saintly empathy for people.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Today unemployment and war constitutes [sic] so serious a threat to the well being and security of the members of our society that many are asking whether that society is capable of meeting its most essential obligations. Communists ask much more of society than this: they ask for all men that opportunity, discipline, and freedom which have characterized the high cultures of the past. But we know that today, with the knowledge and power that are ours, no culture which ignores the elementary needs, no culture based on the denial of opportunity, on indifference to human want, can be either honest or fruitful.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
“Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. “Rutherford wouldn’t have me,” Oppenheimer recalled. “He didn’t think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar.”
Kai Bird
American Prometheus
