Atom Bomb Quotes & Sayings

If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb ... But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself? — Richard Wright

The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people. So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut

A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is fixed. — R.D. Laing

There was nothing the matter with me that was not also the matter with everyone else. I was not as interesting as I thought I was. My major problem, inadequate or inappropriate love from my parents, was as common as dirt. And one rainy day, all the boring poignancy of these realizations detonated in me like an atom bomb, burning the dead shadow of each former torment or preoccupation onto solid rock. Those silhouettes, that record would remain: the museum where I used to be. — J. D. Daniels

The most striking impression was that of an overwhelming bright light. I had seen under similar conditions the explosion of a large amount - 100 tons - of normal explosives in the April test, and I was flabbergasted by the new spectacle. We saw the whole sky flash with unbelievable brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore. Our eyes were accommodated to darkness, and thus even if the sudden light had been only normal daylight it would have appeared to us much brighter than usual, but we know from measurements that the flash of the bomb was many times brighter than the sun. In a fraction of a second, at our distance, one received enough light to produce a sunburn. I was near Fermi at the time of the explosion, but I do not remember what we said, if anything. I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible. — Emilio Segre

If 'Star Wars' wasn't enough to prepare me for a dark future, there was the 'Planet of the Apes' franchise, conveniently repeated for me in Los Angeles on KABC's Channel Seven 3:30 movie. Apes enslaving humans! Mutants with boils and an atom bomb! Ape riots in Century City! They killed baby Caesar's parents! — Greg Van Eekhout

And he prayed that his family would be protected from the atom bomb disease called leukemia. — Eleanor Coerr

We(Pakistan) will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own (Atom bomb) ... We have no other choice! — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

If the Russians ever decide to atom bomb us, they're certain to drop an especially large one on the plant in Pleasantville. — Billy Rose

Less than a decade after the explosion of the first atom bomb the megamachine had expanded to a point where it began to dominate key areas of the whole economy of the United States: its system of control reached beyond the airfields, the rocket sites, the bomb factories, the universities, to a hundred other related areas, tying the once separate and independent enterprises to a central organization whose irrational and humanly subversive policies ensured the still further expansion of the megamachine. Financial subventions, research grants, educational subsidies, all worked unceasingly for the 'Life, Prosperity, Health' of the new rulers, headed by Goliaths in brass armor bellowing threats of defiance and destruction at the entire world. In a short time, the original military-industrial-scientific elite became the supreme Pentagon of Power, for it incorporated likewise both the bureaucratic and the educational establishments. — Lewis Mumford

Non-violence ... is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy. I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima. On the contrary, I said to myself, Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind. — Mahatma Gandhi

FRESH GRIEF FEELS LIKE THIS: Your mind is a maze and every pathway leads to a bricked-up wall, the one where you can see the real world just on the other side, but you can't reach it. It's a feeling like someone's scooped out your insides with a spoon and all that's left is a shell that walks like you and talks like you, but your body and soul have parted ways for a time. Your senses don't fire and you can't connect with another human being because to string all that grief together like a strand of paper dolls would create something as powerful as an atom bomb - you'd implode. So you're all alone. And, for a short while, at least until it sinks in, you can fake anything. — Vikki Wakefield

America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb — Allen Ginsberg

The technological overflow from scientific research has brought scientific research this bad name about carrying an irresponsibility and an alienation from God - because scientific research has led to things like the atom bomb, it's led to problems with depletion of ozone in the Earth's atmosphere, or at least it's revealed those problems. — George Coyne

We think we know."
"Know? That's worse than an atom bomb, and always was. — William Golding

Information has more power than any atom bomb. — Debasish Mridha

The most fearful phenomenon of these midcentury years is not the atom bomb; atomic energy does have its constructive possibilities ... The most fearful event of these times is the colossal expansion of the government of the United States and the constant increase of executive power within the government. — Wheeler McMillen

Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb. — Chuck Palahniuk

The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb. — Joseph Campbell

If Disney still wants to make Epcot Center futuristic, they could do so by blowing the place up with an atom bomb. — P. J. O'Rourke

Kennedy after all has lots of glamour - Gregory Peck with an atom bomb in his holster. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Beauty could be defined simply as 'that which pleases.' But there is another aspect to art, and that ... is the sublime. Like the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb, or the vastness of space as projected to us by satellite ... the greatness of the experience goes beyond your ethical and aesthetic judgment, cutting you free from the binding ego of yourself. With the diminishment of your ego, the less there is of you, the more you see the sublime. — Jen Wang

What is a bow and arrow? It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war. It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering. It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb. — Clifford D. Simak

A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. — James Lee Burke

In the long term, Israel's security rests on only one pillar: the Palestinians' acceptance of the country. It isn't the atom bomb that makes Israel secure. — Daniel Barenboim

It's just a bow and arrow, but it's not a laughing matter. It might have been at one time, but history takes the laugh out of many things. If the arrow is a joke, so is the atom bomb, so is the sweep of disease laden dust that wipes out whole cities, so is the screaming rocket that arcs and falls then thousand miles away and kills a million people. — Clifford D. Simak

Anna took love very seriously. She loved love. No, worshipped, that's the word. She worshipped love. That was the only thing which had any place in her life. That and hatred. Do you know what neutron stars are?'
'They're planets with such compactness and high surface gravity that if I dropped this cigarette on one of them it would strike with the same force as an atom bomb. It was the same with Anna. Her gravitation to love-and hatred-was so strong that nothing could exist in the space between them. Every tiny detail caused an atomic explosion. Do you understand? It took me time to understand. She was like Jupiter-hidden behind an eternal cloud of sulphur. And humour. And sexuality. — Jo Nesbo

First love is unrequited ultimately because it's so huge.It's such an act of giving and it requires so much back that it can never be given back. It's like an atom bomb. It's like ... It's all the energy of who you are and who you want to be and what you love and what you hope to be explodes. It is impossible for a single ... human being to offer that back to you in a mutual way. — Stephen Fry

Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen! — Langston Hughes

Mass travel by air may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb. — Juan Trippe

With the new weapons like the atom bomb, Russia would have it, too, and use it first. It is a very difficult world. But that trouble is imminent is obvious. — Karl Donitz

The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. — Mao Tse-tung

There are only two things I can do better than most people. One of them is to make vodka from goats' milk, and the other is to put together an atom bomb. — Jonas Jonasson

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.
It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose. — Dagobert D. Runes

I'm not the sort of fellow who does the same thing all the time. I began using a lot of science fiction apparatus. I came out with the atom bomb two years before it was actually used because I read in the paper that a fellow named Nicola Tesla was working on the atom bomb. — Jack Kirby

The decision to use the atom bomb on Japanese cities, and the consequent buildup of enormous nuclear arsenals, was made by governments, on the basis of political and military perceptions. — Joseph Rotblat

Time travel is a terrifying weapon, far more powerful than anything ever before conceived,' he said grimly.'Mankind just isn't ready for that kind of knowledge. We're like children casually playing with an atom bomb. — Alex Scarrow

America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism,
not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that
gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled
ice cream. — Marisha Pessl

[Misquotation; not by Einstein.] If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. [Apparently remorseful for his role in the development of the atom bomb.] — Albert Einstein

Everything could undergo conversion except the artists. How can you convert disorganizers of past and present order, the chronic dissenters, those dispossessed of the present anyway, the atom bomb throwers of the mind, of the emotions, seeking to generate new forces and a new order of mind out of continuous upheavals? — Anais Nin

But in the end, if he were a betting man, he says, he'd put his money on the insects. The insects are older than people, they have more experience at surviving, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Anyway, we'll probably blow ourselves sky-high before the end of the century, given the atom bomb and the way things are going. The future belongs to the insects. — Margaret Atwood

You love my art?"
Adam laughed. "Jesus, I tell you I love you and you're more interested with the fact that I love your fucking art? Yeah, Miles, I love your art. I love your smelly paints and weird concoctions and the way you run your hands throught your hair so it stands on end. I love your crazy-ass bird. I love the way you completely lose yourself so deeply in what you're doing that an atom bomb could go off next door and you wouldn't even notice. I love how you look when we've just made love, and I love when you're all pissy and cranky and yelling. I love this cottage and this resort and I love this room and I love your room. I love you." He took a deep breath and forced himself to meet Mile's eyes. "I love you. Do you ... can you ... "
"Moron," Miles said with a grin. He took Adam's hand and dragged him to Miles' own room.
There had to be six-no-eight-no, eleven portraits of Adam hanging on the walls of Miles' bedroom. — Rowan Speedwell

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements ... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. — Jackson Pollock

Anyone who is a Palestinian citizen, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim, should decide together in a very free referendum. There is no need for war. There is no need for threats or an atom bomb either. — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

A millenarian fire burned in Oppenheimer's spirit, fueled by his pride as a world-historical individual, by his fear that the natural force he loosed upon the world would escape all human control, and by a pure-hearted longing to ensure that his discovery of the devastation latent in the elemental substance of the world would serve concord rather than the ultimate discord, perpetual peace rather than permanent self-destruction. — Algis Valiunas

Fear kills, want to kill. Fear is destructive. Love is creative energy. When you love you would like to create - you may like to sing a song, paint, write poetry, but you would not take a bayonet or an atom bomb and go rushing off madly to kill people who are absolutely unknown to you, who have done nothing, who are as unknown to you as you are to them. — Rajneesh

If to a poet a physicist may speak
Freely, as though we shared a common tongue,
For "peace in our time" I should hardly seek
By means that once proved wrong.
It seems the Muscovite
Has quite a healthy, growing appetite.
We can't be safe; at least we can be right.
Some bombs may help - perhaps a bomb-proof cellar,
But surely not the Chamberlain umbrella.
The atom is now big; the world is small.
Unfortunately, we have conquered space.
If war does come, it comes to all,
To every distant place.
Will people have the dash
That Britons had when their world seemed to crash
Before a small man with a small mustache?
You rhyme the atoms to amuse and charm us -
Your counsel should inspire, and not disarm us.

(Teller's reply to an anonymous British man's poem/message (that Americans are too belligerent), both in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). — Edward Teller

It has been said that the First World War was the chemists' war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, and that the Second World War was the physicists' war, because the atom bomb was detonated. Similarly, it has been argued that the Third World War would be the mathematicians' war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war - information. — Simon Singh

It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music,
sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to
produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae
to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any
more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself.
Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make
things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's
formulae. — William S. Burroughs

No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In February, 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disemboweled her with high-explosives and cremated her with incendiaries. The atom bomb may represent a fabulous advance, but it is interesting to note that primitive TNT and thermite managed to exterminate in one bloody night more people than died in the whole London blitz. — Kurt Vonnegut

It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done? — Ursula K. Le Guin

We'll fight back, we'll fight back, we'll fight back, a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did the man intend to fall back upward into the sky in some sort of revenge? — Philip K. Dick

Knowing he [Bob Serber] was going to the [first atom bomb] test, I asked him how he planned to deal with the danger of rattlesnakes. He said, 'I'll take along a bottle of whiskey.' ... I ended by asking, 'What would you do about those possibilities [of what unknown phenomena might cause a nuclear explosion to propagate in the atmosphere]?' Bob replied, 'Take a second bottle of whiskey. — Edward Teller

What is superstition , but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb. — Fritz Leiber

Sex is like an atom bomb. A potent weapon which fascinates and frightens. We're afraid to let it loose, yet we all have our finger on the button.
Zeena Schreck, Cuir Underground: Sado-Magic for Satan Interview, 1998 — Zeena Schreck

The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb. — Rene Magritte

In this age of space flight when we use the modern tools of science to advance into new regions of human activity, the Bible ... remains in every way an up to date book. Our knowledge and use of the laws of nature that enable us to fly to the moon, also enable us to destroy our home planet with the atom bomb. Science itself does not address the question whether we should use the power at our disposal for good or for evil. The guidelines of what we ought to do are furnished in the moral Law of God. — Wernher Von Braun

I'm fascinated with the attitude of younger rock bands, even ones that are making money at it. I don't ever hear them talk about it as a "career." It almost makes me think there isn't even a music industry anymore, like an atom bomb fell and it was just eradicated forever. — Travis Morrison

If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British. — Mahatma Gandhi

The atom bomb fueled the entire world that came after it. It showed that indiscriminate killing and indiscriminate homicide on a mass level was possible ... whereas if you look at warfare up until that point, you had to see somebody to shoot them or maim them, you had to look at them. You don't have to do that anymore. — Bob Dylan

The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb. — Diana Vreeland

The atom bomb was no 'great decision.' It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. — Harry S. Truman

Then he said, "That's a long way from stage designing, isn't it." She nodded. "Quite a long way." She started to ask him if he intended to do any work pertaining to the atom bomb, but she didn't, because what would it matter if he did or didn't? — Patricia Highsmith

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer. — Lydia Millet

In an age in which the classic words of the Surrealists - 'As beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella' - can become reality and perfectly achievable with an atom bomb, so too has there been a surge of interest in biomechanoids — H.R. Giger

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear. — Anthony Doerr

Nuclear scientists lost their innocence when we used the atom bomb for the very first time. So we could argue computer scientists lost their innocence in 2009 when we started using malware as an offensive attack weapon. — Mikko Hypponen

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent. — Charles De Gaulle

Welcome baby it's your turn to live they're laying for you chicken pox whooping cough smallpox malaria TB heart disease cancer and so on unemployment hunger and so on train wrecks bus accidents plane crashes on-the-job injuries earthquakes floods droughts and so on heartbreak alcoholism and so on nightsticks prisons doors and so on they're laying for you the atom bomb and so on welcome baby it's your turn to live they're laying for you socialism communism and so on. — Nazim Hikmet

Well, there's always Nevada," Benny said. "You can buy anything from a hand laser to an atom bomb there. — Joe Haldeman

The atom was unleashed in 1946, right when all this stuff was occurring. And the bomb's incredible release of energy and light may have signalled somebody in a dimension which is sharing space with us very closely. — Dwight Schultz

I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened. — Lanford Wilson

It was my responsibility that this world got itself an atom bomb, because there were only a handful of nuclear physicists in the thirties - only a handful. And we were all beating the desk and saying How wonderful it will be if we discover atomic fission. — L. Ron Hubbard

Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbour. (1936) — Francis William Aston

I think if a man can create something like an atom bomb, he can surely create something with his own mind. — Ozzy Osbourne

The trouble with science geeks, as you call them, is that hey put discovery before anything else. It was a science geek who discovered the atom bomb. He didn't intend to cause mass murder, but he did nonetheless. — Gemma Malley

Peace through superior violence inevitably leads to the atom bomb and all that it stands for. — Mahatma Gandhi

But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction. — Joseph Rotblat

We walked out of there, and for the first time I felt the mood of a night without feeling that an author was ramming it down my throat for story purposes. I looked at the clean-swept, star-reaching cubism of the Radio City area and its living snakes of neon, and I suddenly thought of an Evelyn Smith story the general idea of which was "After they found out the atom bomb was magic, the rest of the magicians who enchanted refrigerators and washing machines and the telephone system came out into the open." I felt a breath of wind and wondered what it was that had breathed. I heard the snoring of the city and for an awesome second felt it would roll over, open its eyes, and ... speak. — Theodore Sturgeon

During the Trinity test of the very first atom bomb, Fermi wondered if the detonation would ignite the Earth's atmosphere. They just didn't know, you see. We think the quantum disruption won't propagate. If it does, then the whole universe gets converted into energy. — Peter F. Hamilton