There is something ...

There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.
There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.
 J. Robert Oppenheimer

More phrases

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Quotes from the same author

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
 J. Robert Oppenheimer
The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance-these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.
 J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.
 J. Robert Oppenheimer
It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.
 J. Robert Oppenheimer
Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. 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.
 J. Robert Oppenheimer