Oppenheimer's greatest gift is his intellect, quick mind, and capacity to understand things esoteric; he spreaded the 'gospel' of quantum mechanics in the States after he returned from Europe. Oppie was a “cultivated scholar, a linguist of eight tongues.” He read Marcel Proust in French, Dante in Italian, and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in German. He studied Greek and Latin before going to Harvard in 1922, and where he read the entire 3000 pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. (The New York Times wrote in his obituary that he read it on a train trip from California to the East Coast.) He gave a lecture in Dutch six weeks after arriving Netherlands to study with Ehrenfest.
On his reflection of seeing the mushroom clouds rising from the first test explosion of atomic bomb, he wrote, quoting from the Hindu sacred Scripture, "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One." and “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."
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