From Chernobyl Quotes & Sayings

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: "You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl." He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn't believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. "She should at least have fingers," I thought. "She's a girl. — Svetlana Alexievich

There are some remarks that are so stupid that to be even vaguely aware of them is the intellectual equivalent of living next door to Chernobyl. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. — Frederik Pohl

We have witnessed Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Seveso, Amoco Cadiz, Three Mile Island and have still not wakened from our fantasy that large organizations can carry out complex technologies on a huge scale with total perfection. — Donella Meadows

I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them. — Svetlana Alexievich

Cesium, iodine from the Chernobyl reactor accident went around the world many times and everyone on the Earth has a piece of Chernobyl in their bodies, but it's very tiny - too small to cause much damage. — Michio Kaku

At first we were all turned into animals. The very word "Chernobyl" is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look at you. He's from there! That — Svetlana Alexievich

I was flipping back and forth between do and don't quicker than they were serving up flapjacks down at the diner, he was getting closer to me.... close enough that I could smell him.... smell the heat that he threw off and that other certain energy that was pouring off of him right now at levels I'd not seen since Chernobyl. If I didn't move soon, I'd be in trouble... or ecstasy. — Donna Augustine

There you are: a normal person. A little person. You're just like everyone else - you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You're a normal person! And then one day you're suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone's interested in, and that no one knows anything about. — Svetlana Alexievich

After Chernobyl, thousands and thousands of people, if not millions, were given a death penalty and had to pay the price, our father among them. — Wladimir Klitschko

In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke ... about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society. — Sam Kinison

To my real estate agent, Chernobyl is a fixer-upper. — Yakov Smirnoff

Accident - A statistical inevitability. Some nuclear power plants are built on fault lines, but ever mine, dam, oil rig, and waste dump is founded upon a tacit acceptance of the worst-case scenario. One a long enough timeline, everything that can go wrong will, however small the likelihood is from one day to the next. The responsible parties may wring their hands about the Fukushima meltdown - and the Gult of Mexico oil spill, and the Exxon Valdez, and Hurricane Katrina, and Chernobyl, and Haiti - but accident is no accident. — CrimethInc.

Natural gas is highly explosive, invisible, poisonous, and odorless. Yet we accept natural gas, even though it kills not two but 400 Americans a year, because it was introduced before we got crazy about risk. We accept coal, even though mining it is nasty and filthy and kills dozens of people every year. By contrast, we're terrified of nuclear energy. Chernobyl, the worst nuclear power disaster ever, killed only 30 people. Some say the radiation may eventually kill others, but even if that's true, natural gas kills more people every year. — John Stossel

One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets. — James E. Lovelock

So we can simulate Richter-10 earthquakes. We simulate 70-foot waves coming into these things. Very cool. We basically say no human should ever be required to do anything, because if you judge by Chernobyl and Fukushima, the human element is not on your side. — Bill Gates

The world has been experiencing a whole pattern of auto-destruction, whether in environmental disasters like Chernobyl or health disasters like AIDS. — Niki De St. Phalle

Before Chernobyl or without Chernobyl the nuclear power was the safe thing. — Abdus Salam

Buy potatoes," he said. "Gotta hop." Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them. — Michael Lewis

In fact, all of us have a piece of Chernobyl in our bodies going back to 1986. — Michio Kaku

... Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution."
"It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did.
"You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to. — Rebecca McNutt

Chernobyl, an accident or the most successful anti-Marxist attack in recorded history? — Anders Breivik

Another thing we wanted to do, a lot of shows or movies that are in the future or the post-apocalyptic are very bleached, desaturated desert environments and we wanted to do the opposite of that. There's always talk about Chernobyl and the world that environment has recovered has become this idyllic, bizarrely refuge for wildlife. — Miles Millar

(More radioactive material fell on Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as a result of Chernobyl than from Three Mile Island.) — William Tucker

Eighteen years since the Chernobyl disaster. Is it just me surprized? Still no superheroes! — Jimmy Carr

People ask me: "Why don't you take photos in color? In color!" But Chernobyl: literally it means black event. There are no other colors there. — Svetlana Alexievich

Nuclear power must be dealt with irrationally ... Nuclear plants are carcinogens. Let's get that story out ... Their lies will catch up to them. We need endless Chernobyl reminders. — Ralph Nader

That's what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit. — Joe Hill

Flying in a modern jet airplane doses the human with levels of radiation comparable to those found in nuclear disaster zones. — Steven Magee

People who've been through that kind of humiliation together, or who've seen what people can be like, at the bottom, run from one another. There's something I felt in Chernobyl, something I understood that I don't really want to talk about. About the fact, for example, that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people don't behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around. People aren't heroes."--Sergei Gurin — Svetlana Alexievich

I'm a product of my time. I'm not a criminal. — Svetlana Alexievich

Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!' Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. 'Don't worry!' she says. 'They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss. — Svetlana Alexievich

Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air. — Svetlana Alexievich

Ukraine announced plans to open Chernobyl, their nuclear disaster site, to tourists. They say it's just like Disneyland, except the 6-foot mouse is real. — Conan O'Brien

If my goals and victories can help the world remember Chernobyl and bring a smile to the face of the people still suffering then I dedicate all my success to them. — Andriy Shevchenko

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation. — Svetlana Alexievich

Ten years after the Chernobyl accident, and am I the only one that's disappointed? Still no superheros. — Jimmy Carr

The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: — Geert Mak

We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. — Svetlana Alexievich

This may read like a mad journey through some of the most dangerous places on earth, but it is much more than that as well. Sheets witnessed most of the wars, disasters, and revolutions that followed the end of communism, and his accounts of them
from Chechnya to Chernobyl, and from Abkhazia to Afghanistan
serve as a passionate but considered obituary for the vanished Soviet empire. — Oliver Bullough

Chernobyl haunts us with the reminder that all of man's ambitions are ephemeral. Our grandest designs and sturdiest monuments, — Josh Gates

Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoevsky, an attempt to justify mankind. — Svetlana Alexievich

Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population. — Svetlana Alexievich

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant ... has painfully affected the Soviet people, and shocked the international community. For the first time, we confront the real force of nuclear energy, out of control. — Mikhail Gorbachev

At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared. — Svetlana Alexievich

There was genuine affection. Mom knew all this. "Thank God Eloise is uglier than a cow living near Chernobyl," Mom liked to say. "Or I might wonder." Dad — Harlan Coben

My father is standing at the sink wearing a too-tight long-sleeved red T-Shirt, a pair of too-high jeans and sporting the type of orange glow that belongs only on Chernobyl victims. Plus his hair looks like an oil spill.
'Hey you,' he says, washing what looks to be some carrots under the sink. Are they carrots or are they parsnips reflecting the sheen of my father's tangerine skin? Hard to tell.
'You've fake tanned yourself again,' I say - it's a statement, not a question. 'Too much?' he says, innocently. 'I just didn't want to be one of those pasty office workers and I thought it wouldn't hurt to back up last week's application with another hit.'
'Dad, you look-'
'Sun kissed?'
'Radioactive. And what the hell happened to your hands?'
- Cat — Rebecca Sparrow

The Chernobyl technology is different from the technology which is used in the west, mainly. — Abdus Salam

This is what they mean by 'ghost town', she thought. It truly feels like a place frozen in time — Jeremy Robinson

I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father — Svetlana Alexievich

The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima - so it's more visible. — Bill Gates

She'd never set a fantasy in a ski lodge, but she was thinking about it now. She couldn't help it. The man was throwing off pheromones like he was a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Sitting so close to ground zero, the fallout was lethal. — Rachel Gibson

The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer's vocabulary - Fermi was only then inventing that specialty - but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city. — Richard Rhodes

I think the wildest wildlife you can find these days is in Chernobyl, where wolves are running around breeding quite well in the nuclear disaster zones. — Aleksandra Mir

Is there anything more frightening than people? — Svetlana Alexievich

During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As — Svetlana Alexievich

Even if you look at the 'Paranormal Activity' movies, at the end of the movie things get really crazy and nutty, but they all start in a very mundane situation that people can relate to, and that's also to some degree what we tried to do in 'Chernobyl Diaries.' — Oren Peli

Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic. — Svetlana Alexievich

The reactors in Japan are stable in the same way that a ticking time bomb is also stable. It wouldn't take much to light the fuse - a 6.6 earthquake, like what happened today in Japan, a pipe break, an over-pressurized containment vessel - anything could set it off, in which case we would have another Chernobyl, three times the magnitude of a Chernobyl accident. — Michio Kaku

The doctors said that I got sick because my father worked at Chernobyl. And after that I was born. I love my father. — Svetlana Alexievich