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date: 24 January 2025

J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–67
American physicist 

  1. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita…‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’
    on the explosion of the first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 16 July 1945
    Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965); see Bhagavadgita
  2. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
    lecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 25 November 1947
  3. 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 In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, USAEC Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (1954)