Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.
Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.
The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us; you may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.
A lecture is much more of a dialogue than many of you probably realize.
There's life all over this universe, but the only life in the solar system is on earth, and in the whole universe we are the only men.
I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.
All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
It's not good enough to give it tender, loving care, to supply it with breakfast foods, to buy it expensive educations. Those things don't mean anything unless this generation has a future. And we're not sure that it does.
The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful.
We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.
You see, every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years.
We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.
We have fallen in love with the body. That's that thing that looks back at us from the mirror. That's the repository of that lovely identity that you keep chasing all your life.
To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.
The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them.
The thought that we're in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial. We are one species, with a world to win.
