J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere.

The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must he the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

So long as men and women are free, no one is safe. People will be in danger because others can't operate vehicles responsibly or shoot straight. Because physicians are sometimes incompetent and lawyers dishonest. But most of all they will be in danger from ideas. It is the price we willingly pay to be free. Nor would we have it any other way.

The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop.

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

Under democracy, individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded.

The hardest lesson of my life has come to me late. It is that a nation can win freedom without its people becoming free.

Unless liberty flourishes in all lands, it cannot flourish in one.

Liberty cannot be sacrificed for the sake of anything.

Being a conservative also used to involve the concept of people being free to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. Conservatives used to be very libertarian.

America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom - is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life.

The natural state of man is to want to be free. To have opportunities. To have choices.

See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Freedom is never granted. It is earned by each generation.

The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.

In the long and dogged crusade that the human race has fought in favor of democracy, the ideal of liberty, of freedom, has always been the goal.

Freedom, liberty, individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a matter that is not initiating force against them, is critical to me.

If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.

It's liberty or it's death. It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.

So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.

One principle is the universality of freedom. I'm a freedom lover.

My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life.