J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)

In her mind's eye she saw it, saw it all at last: the rolling armies and the flames of battle; the graves and pits and dying cries of a hundred million souls; the spreading darkness, like a black wing stretching over the earth; the last, bitter hours of cruelty and sorrow, and the terrible, final flights; death's great dominion over all, and, at the last, empty cities, becalmed by the silence of a hundred years. Already these things were coming to pass.

The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.

Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

War is horrible because it strangles youth.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

There's nothing glamorous about war at all.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.

War is never cheap or easy.

I have been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up and I do not want to see another.

The papers are full of the atomic bomb [Hiroshima] which is going to revolutionize everything and blow us all to buggery. Not a bad idea.

There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell

The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

War is very sad and small life is pathetically fragile at times.

There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.