H Bomb Quotes & Sayings

In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances nuclear warfare. — J.B. Priestley

Historically, the Germans had a habit of associating the names of objects with the sounds they made. After bell makers-turned-cannon-makers learned that by closing off the mouth of the cannon before lighting the fuse, the entire cannon could be made to explode, the device they invented became known as the 'bum' (for boom!). In keeping with this tradition, the first one-thousand-pound bomb was dubbed 'ein laussen bum' (meaning, "a loud boom"). After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, they called the fission device 'ein grossen laussen bum' (or, "a big loud boom"). The next obvious step was the fusion, or H-bomb, which was pronounced 'ein grossen laussen bum all ist kaput! — Charles Pellegrino

Art has the ability to change minds. Passion is what changes the world. When both collide, it's as powerful as a bomb. Art isn't pretty and poised fluff. Art is brutal and snarling. Artists growl. This is the roar of change that beats within them. - 8/29/11 — A.H. Scott

He felt everything - pride in his competence and leadership during the Second World War, pride in his noble intransigence during the Cold War, intellectual pleasure in what he called the "technically sweet" conception of the H-bomb, self-disgust that he could feel such pleasure in so monstrous a creation - but could decide on nothing. Brilliance of this scattershot type effectively disqualifies a man from political decision-making. Oppenheimer was simply not the sort of man a nation can entrust with its fate. — Algis Valiunas

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb. — W. H. Auden

We have never sought power. We have sought to disperse power, to set men and women free. That really means: to help them to discover that they are free. Everybody's free. The slave is free. The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. 'Fear is failure.' 'The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.' Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' The goose can break the bottle at any second. Socrates took the hemlock to prove it. Jesus went to the cross to prove it. It's in all history, all myth, all poetry. It's right out in the open all the time. — Robert Anton Wilson

I, for one, bet on science as helping us. I have yet to see how it fundamentally endangers us, even with the H-bomb lurking about. Science has given us more lives than it has taken; we must
remember that. — Philip K. Dick

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim's breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new "gadget," as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb - a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki - brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated. — Algis Valiunas

Ever since we'd found Wilson, his cousin's calmness bothered me. I realized now I felt less unease with angry outbursts from grieving relatives, than I had with the slow, ticking time bomb of the quiet and collected.
--Prepped for Kill, Marjorie Gardens Mystery Book 2 — A.E.H. Veenman

I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. One morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb's admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist's. — Albert Camus

A man who has been shaken by a two-ton blockbuster has a frame of reference. He can equate the impact of an H-bomb with his own experience, even though the H-bomb blast is a million times more powerful than the shock he endured. To someone who has never felt a bomb, bomb is only a word. An H-bomb's fireball is something you see on television. It is not something that incinerates you to a cinder in the thousandth part of a second. So the H-bomb is beyond the imagination of all but a few Americans, while the British, Germans, and Japanese can comprehend it, if vaguely. And only the Japanese have personal understanding of atomic heat and radiation. — Pat Frank

I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast — Ronald Reagan

Then the 1956 Peace Prize went to Eisenhower and Khrushchev for agreeing not to build the hydrogen bomb. That agreement was now also called the Szilard Treaty. Today the H-bomb was a threshold no one dared cross without exciting hostile moves by all other powers. — Gregory Benford

All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all. — Austin Grossman

The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn't as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war's consequences. — E.B. White

Magic was all fun and games until you had the H-bomb of spell materials on the bottom of your shoes. — Marisha Pessl

Be careful of him Dai, whether you agree with me or not that boy is a time bomb just waiting to explode, and when he does he's going hit everyone in his way including you ... or especially you.
Benjirou Uie warning Dai about Kane from Game Boys — Rochelle H. Ragnarok

If not for me, the H-bomb would have been developed in Russia first. In the U.S., we'd now be speaking Russian. — Edward Teller

Each one of us is hard at war - within. We must face this battlefield; withdraw, as the psychologist would say, our habitual projections of that strife from the world around us, and realize that we should be so busy killing the selfishness within that we really have not the time, much less the will to blow up our neighbour. And when a few more individuals recognize that the war within implies a friendly tolerance of those about one, and of their ways of living and internal fighting, the Hitlers and Stalins and even the unpleasant fellow next door may provoke in everyman a smile, rather than an H-bomb, or even a bow and arrow. — Christmas Humphreys

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

Jesus' favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in church, and only a couple mention the name God. As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren't about God, so there was nothing in them threatening their own sovereignty. They relaxed their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts. An abyss opened up at their very feet. He was talking about God; they had been invaded! — Eugene H. Peterson

Just then, a telltale scent reached Trez's nose and rocketed through his blood, the impact wrenching his head and his body around ...
Whereupon he lost all thought. All breath. And all of his soul.
Selena stood at the head of the bloodred-carpeted steps, her lovely hand resting on the gold-leafed balustrade, her body held stiffly, as if she weren't sure about her shoes, or her dress, or maybe even her hair.
There was absolutely nothing to worry about.
Unless she had a problem with being an H-bomb. — J.R. Ward

If [an oral contraceptive] could be discovered soon, the H-bomb need never fall. . . . [It would be] the greatest aid ever discovered to the happiness and security of individual families - indeed to mankind. . . The greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy. John Rock, clinical researcher of the oral contraceptive, 19541 — Elaine Tyler May

The hydrogen bomb is not the answer to the Western peoples' dream of full and final insurance of their security ... While it has increased their striking power it has sharpened their anxiety and deepened their sense of insecurity. — B.H. Liddell Hart

One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable
that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him. — H.L. Mencken

War is a simple matter compared with revolution. War is an applied science, with well-defined principles tested in history; analogous solutions may be found from ballista to H-bomb. But every revolution is a freak, a mutant, a monstrosity, its conditions never to be repeated and its operations carried out by amateurs and individualists. — Robert A. Heinlein

Obliteration bombing of civilian populations had come to be seen as a military necessity. A terrible evil had been defended as a way to a greater good. After the bomb, all sorts of moral compromises were easier - nearly two million abortions a year seemed a mere matter of freedom of choice, and the plight of the poor in the world's richest nation was a matter of economic necessity. — William H. Willimon

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal. — J.D. Salinger

The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess. — H.G.Wells

The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell because the Japanese had lost control of their own air. — Henry H. Arnold

The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor Capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile
it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent. — John F. Kennedy

The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. — Robert Anton Wilson