The title of this essay is taken from Robert Oppenheimer. He had three types of excellence in mind: first, for the theoretician, the excellence of new ideas while he attempts to read Allah's design; for the experimenter, the excellence of new discoveries, the sheer pleasure of the search of carrying an experimental technique to its limits and beyond; and, finally, of the desire to spite the theorist. Oppenheimer had these forms of excellence in mind, but also much more: He emphasized the opportunity physics affords to come to know internationally a class of great human beings whom one respects not only for their intellectual eminence but also for their personal human qualities – a reflection of their greatness in physics. In addition, he had in mind the opportunities that physics uniquely affords for involvement with humankind – in the parlance of today, in engaging in problems of development and of enhancing the human ideal.

I wish to speak here on some aspects of Oppenheimer's thoughts from a personal point of view. I shall illustrate these by recalling my induction into research on the renormalization of meson theories and the excellent men I was privileged to meet while pursuing this research. I also wish to speak on excellence through world development. In particular, I want to speak about the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, whose creation, under the auspices of the United Nations, I was privileged to suggest in September 1960. The Centre came into being only in October 1964 – beyond the cutoff date of this symposium's coverage.