J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

Who would have thought around 1900 that in fifty years time we would know so much more and understand so much less.

Against Knowledge I have, as the light cynic observed of a certain lady's past, only one serious objection - that there is so much of it.

When I know too much I get bored too fast.

I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

The more you know about something, the harder it becomes. You become more and more of a perfectionist. I think it's a curse... It's a form of illness!

There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about.

There is a reason you don’t know all the things I know. -Marcus Eaton

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.

Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.

The literature has become too vast to comprehend...It is...difficult to grasp even for workers in closely neighboring fields. ...There is much more reliance on word of mouth for the transmission of scientific data...gossip.

It is not possible to know what you need to learn.

I would not be able to retain all the information, all the medical jargon these doctors do. I'm not really intelligent enough is what I'm saying.

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

I know too much and not enough

Of writing many books there is no end.

You don't have to know everything as long as you know people who know the things you don't

The more I know, the less I understand

Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.

How it is we have so much information, but know so little?

How ignorant we are! How ignorant everyone is! We can cut across only a small area of the appallingly expanding fields of knowledge. No human being can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. It must have been satisfactory in ancient times when one's own land seemed to be the universe; when research studies, pamphlets, books did not issue in endless flow; when laboratories and scientists were not so rapidly pushing back frontiers of knowledge that the process of unlearning the old left you gasping for breath.

The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don't know.

The world is too full of information.

We used to have lots of questions to which there were no answers. Now, with the computer, there are lots of answers to which we haven't thought up questions.

In the midst of all this great variety of subjects, an individual cannot attain to perfection in each, because it is scarcely in his power to take in and comprehend the general theories of them.