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.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

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.

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

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

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

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

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.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

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

"It worked." (said after witnessing the first atomic detonation).

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

I never accepted Communist dogma or theory.

I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.

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.

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.

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.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

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.

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.

The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

To recruit staff, I traveled all over the country talking with people who had been working on one or another aspect of the atomic-energy enterprise and people in radar work, for example, and underwater sound, telling them about the job, the place that we are going to, and enlisting their enthusiasm.

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance the wise grows it under his feet.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity no humor no overstatement can quite extinguish the physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

The powerful notion of entropy which comes from a very special branch of physics is certainly useful in the study of communication and quite helpful when applied in the theory of language.

Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

After my spectacular failures, I could not be satisfied with an ordinary success.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

I define success as being comfortable with yourself and your life. And that is about as good as it gets, really.

No one is guaranteed happiness. You can pursue it, but if you happen to find success along the way on that road to happiness, Conservatives believe you should not be demonized or penalized for it.

PR is extremely important, and being able to use it in the right way means everything. You have to market your success.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort.

When I meet successful people I ask 100 questions as to what they attribute their success to. It is usually the same: persistence, hard work and hiring good people.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.

There's no such thing as an overnight success. It took me a long to get there.

The secret to my success is that I bit off more than I could chew and chewed as fast as I could.