Thermonuclear Weapons Quotes & Sayings

I didn't want to, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me - to have! to know! to wear! - her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten. — Lorrie Moore

Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild - and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. — Joseph Conrad

There are anthropogenic state risks at the existential level as well: the longer we live in an internationally anarchic system, the greater the cumulative chance of a thermonuclear Armageddon or of a great war fought with other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, laying waste to civilization. — Nick Bostrom

The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers - and
thermonuclear weapons. — Arthur C. Clarke

Over most of history, threats have come from nature - disease, earthquakes, floods, and so forth. But the worst now come from us. We've entered a geological era called the anthropocene. This started, perhaps, with the invention of thermonuclear weapons. — Martin Rees

I would rather die in America than live in England. I would rather lose a match in America than win one in England. I have come to the conclusion that I neither mean to die soon or to lose the match! — Wilhelm Steinitz

Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous. — Carl Sagan

The time is not far off when many nations in many parts of the world of many political shades and commitments will possess nuclear or even thermonuclear weapons. — John F. Kennedy

Resolution 1441 does not give anyone the right to an automatic use of force. Russia believes that the Iraqi problem should be regulated by the Security Council, which carries the main responsibility for ensuring international security. — Igor Ivanov

The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier attitude toward death that has always puzzled me. My impression is that ... most of the defenders of these weapons are not suitably horrified at the possibility of a war in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed ... I suspect that an important factor may be belief in an afterlife, and that the proporttion of those who think that death is not the end is much higher among the partisans of the bomb than among its opponents. — Thomas Nagel

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found. — Elizabeth Bowen