Atomic Bomb Quotes - Page 5

• Before the first atomic bomb test, scientists took the time to calculate whether the blast would ignite the nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere and incinerate us all. The risk was low and the test went off, but Rees wonders what the odds would have had to be to discourage the bomb makers.

  Dennis Overbye

  Funny, Science, Technology

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• My fear is that that's what's going to happen with robotics and the military. Importantly, this discussion has to involve not just the scientists, but also the political scientists. It's got to be a multidisciplinary discussion. You can't have it be another repeat of what happened with the people working on the atomic bomb.

  Peter Singer

  Military, People, Political

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• When we blew the first atomic bomb at White Sands near the end of the war, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a theory that the chain reaction would continue forever. And we would have created a little tiny sun out there in the desert that would burn until the end of the universe. It wasn't a widely held theory but it was a theory that nobody had a way of disproving. There were people who thought it wouldn't go off at all, that it would simply sit out there and melt and produce a great big dirty cloud of radioactivity. Nobody knew.

  Stephen King

  War, Dirty, White

  High Times Magazine Interview with Martha Thomases, John Robert Tebbel, October 1981.

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• Downwinders, meaning those people, individuals, communities that were downwind of the nuclear test site. During those years when we were testing atomic bombs above ground, when we watched them for entertainment from the roofs of our high schools, little did we know what was raining down on us, little did we know what would appear years later.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Rain, School, Years

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many. … Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs.

  Emilio G. Segre

  Political, Matter, Lasts

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• If some nuclear properties of the heavy elements had been a little different from what they turned out to be, it might have been impossible to build a bomb.

  Emilio G. Segre

  Might, Different, Nuclear

  "Enrico Fermi: Physicist". Book by Emilio G. Segre (p. 149), 1970.

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• As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can't leave anything alone."

  Quentin Crisp

  Bangs, Bombs

  "The Naked Civil Servant". Book by Quentin Crisp, Chapter 13, 1968.

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• In some ways more painful is the fact that their experience appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind. Having never experienced an atomic bombing, the vast majority around the world can only vaguely imagine such horror, and these days, John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth are all but forgotten. As predicted by the saying, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing.

  Tadatoshi Akiba

  Memories, War, Fate

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• Pressure hulls collapse at the speed of sound. Once that starts, you're inside your own little imploding atomic bomb, and you're gone.

  Graham Hawkes

  Sound, Hull, Gone

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• The ghost of the heart of manred Cain
  And the more murderous brain
  Of Man, still redder Nero that conceived the death
  Of his mother Earth, and tore
  Her womb, to know the place where he was conceived.

  Edith Sitwell

  Mother, Heart, Men

  Dame Edith Sitwell (1952). “Selected Poems”

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• It is the large brain capacity which allows man to live as a human being, enjoy taxes, canned salmon, television, and the atomic bomb.

  Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald

  Men, Brain, Salmon

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• The atomic bomb provoked a specific accident.

  Paul Virilio

  Bombs, Provoked, Accidents

  Source: ctheory.net

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• In an enterprise such as the building of the atomic bomb the difference between ideas, hopes, suggestions and theoretical calculations, and solid numbers based on measurement, is paramount. All the committees, the politicking and the plans would have come to naught if a few unpredictable nuclear cross sections had been different from what they are by a factor of two.

  Emilio G. Segre

  Ideas, Two, Differences

  Epigraph by Emilio G. Segre in Richard Rhodes' book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (p. 8), 1986.

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• Fatigue is what we experience, but it is what a match is to an atomic bomb.

  Laura Hillenbrand

  Hydrogen Bomb, Bombs, Fatigue

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• I hate the phrase “One thing led to another”. What kind of lazy writing is that? Isn't it your job as a writer to tell me how that made this happen? “Adolf Hitler was rejected as a young man in his application to an art school. One thing led to anotherand the United States ended up dropping two atomic bombs on the sovereign nation of Japan”.

  Brian Regan

  Art, Jobs, Hate

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• We walk the brink of racial suicide because we were smart enough to make atomic bombs and stupid enough to use them.

  David Zindell

  Suicide, Real, Smart

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• The ginkgo tree is from the era of dinosaurs, but while the dinosaur has been extinguished, the modern ginkgo has not changed. After the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the ginkgo was the first tree that came up. It's amazing.

  Koji Nakanishi

  Change, Science, Tree

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• I want to make meditation an absolute for all students, whatever the subject they may be studying, so their awareness becomes more and more clean and clear. And out of that clarity we can create a beautiful world. Those scientists, if they are also meditators, will not create atomic bombs to destroy. They may use atomic energy to move trains so they don't pollute the air. They may use that atomic energy in the factories so they don't pollute air. Rather than killing man, the same atomic energy can be a tremendous help to save man and his future.

  Rajneesh

  Beautiful, Moving, Men

  Osho, Rajneesh (Bhagwan Shree) (1988). “The Greatest Challenge: The Golden Future : a Manifesto”

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• So far as I can see the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Death, Science, Men

  Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton (2007). “Gandhi on Non-Violence”, p.45, New Directions Publishing

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• On 17th July there came to us at Potsdam the eagerly-awaited news of the trial of the atomic bomb in the [New] Mexican desert. Success beyond all dreams crowded this sombre, magnificent venture of our American allies. The detailed reports ... could leave no doubt in the minds of the very few who were informed, that we were in the presence of a new factor in human affairs, and possessed of powers which were irresistible.

  Winston Churchill

  Success, Dream, Science

  "Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963" by Robert Rhodes James, Vol. 1, p. 7210, 1974.

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• Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.

  Neal Stephenson

  Bombs, Opponents, Aliens

  Neal Stephenson (2010). “Anathem”, p.172, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I will have nothing to do with a bomb! [Response to being invited (1943) to work with Otto Robert Frisch and some British scientists at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.]

  Lise Meitner

  Bombs, Manhattan, Scientist

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• We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.

  E. B. White

  Loyalty, Fighting, Tolerance

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.92, Cornell University Press

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• People who talk of outlawing the atomic bomb are mistaken - what needs to be outlawed is war.

  Leslie Groves

  Peace, War, People

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• I've been telling you for years that if they don't get their way, if all of this stuff that's happened does not enable them to bring about their world totalitarian socialist government, disarm the American people and create their New World Order, they'll blow up an American city with an atomic bomb. They will do it. I have said it probably a couple of hundred times.

  William Bill

  Couple, Blow, Socialist Government

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