Hiroshima Quotes - Page 4

• The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

  Gore Vidal

  Army, Self, World

  "The End of Gore Vidal". Interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh, www.guernicamag.com. August 15, 2012.

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• The use of force is easy to rationalize in terms of basic economics. 'We should make them PAY for what they've done!' It's just the law of demand: raise the price of crossing us, and fewer people will cross us. Make the price another Hiroshima, and perhaps the quantity demanded will fall to zero.

  Bryan Caplan

  Zero, Fall, Law

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• The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.

  Edward Abbey

  War, Technology, Dachau

  "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal". Book by Edward Abbey (Chapter 11 "Money Et Cetera", p. 100), 1989.

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• I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.

  J. G. Ballard

  War, Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Bombs

  "The End of My War". Sunday Times, 1995.

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• ... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.

  Paul Virilio

  War, Shadow, Film

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• I'm the Hiroshima of love.

  Sylvester Stallone

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• What helps me is watching other people negotiate loss. I think about how we dropped a bomb on people in Hiroshima and 150,000 people were killed in one night. Those people had to mourn and they had to rebuild their city right away.

  Patti Smith

  Loss, Night, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  War, Hands, Civilization

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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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• It is people who are violent, rather than "religions"; and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received ideas.

  Karen Armstrong

  War, Ideas, Two

  "A conversation with Karen Armstrong". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• It's all a play. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen, there are hundreds of thousands of dead, and the curtain comes down, and that's the end of that. Then Korea happens. Vietnam happens, all that happened in Latin America happens. And every now and then, this curtain comes down and history begins anew. New moralities and new indignations are manufactured...in a disappeared history.

  Arundhati Roy

  Latin, Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Korea

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Three-hundred times as many people died in Hamburg during the ten-day blitz as died in Coventry during the entire course of the war. “Not even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suffering the smashing blows of nuclear explosions, could match the utter hell of Hamburg.

  Martin Caidin

  War, Blow, Hiroshima And Nagasaki

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• I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima - and you know, is the price worth it?

  Lesley Stahl

  Children, War, Mean

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• With the persistence of tensions and conflicts in various parts of the world, the international community must never forget what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a warning and in incentive to develop truly effective and peaceful means of settling tensions and disputes. Fifty years after the Second World War, the leaders of nations cannot become complacent but rather should renew their commitment to disarmament and to the banishment of all nuclear weapons.

  Pope John Paul II

  Religious, War, Commitment

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• I have two lovely sons and some good memories, but I've had a rather tumultuous personal life. It hasn't been dull; I've been the Hiroshima of love.

  Sylvester Stallone

  Memories, Son, Two

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• Toward the end of the Cold War, capitalism created a military horror: the neutron bomb, a weapon that destroys life while leaving buildings intact. During the Fourth World War, however, a new wonder has been discovered: the financial bomb. Unlike those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this new bomb not only destroys the polis (here, the nation), imposing death, terror, and misery on those who live there, but also transforms its target into just another piece in the puzzle of economic globalization.

  Subcomandante Marcos

  Military, War, Hiroshima And Nagasaki

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• There is no question in my mind that we live in one of the truly bestial centuries in human history. There are plenty of signposts for the future historian, and what do they say? They say 'Auschwitz' and 'Dresden' and 'Hiroshima' and 'Vietnam' and 'Napalm.' For many years we all woke up to the daily body count on the radio. And if there were a way to kill people with the B Minor Mass, the Pentagon-Madison Avenue axis would have found it.

  Erwin Chargaff

  Death, Science, Axes

  Erwin Chargaff (1977). “Voices in the labyrinth: nature, man, and science”, Harper San Francisco

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• I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.

  R. J. Hollingdale

  Death, Stars, Science

  "RJ Hollingdale" by Carol Diethe, www.theguardian.com. October 10, 2001.

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• At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

  John Hersey

  Girl, Morning, Past

  John Hersey (1946). “Hiroshima”

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• A bright light filled the plane. The first shock-wave hit us. We were eleven and a half miles slant range from the atomic explosion but the whole airplane cracked and crinkled from the blast... We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud... mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall.

  Paul Tibbets

  War, Airplane, Cities

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• It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... In being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.

  William D. Leahy

  War, Dark, Ethical Standards

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people's descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death.

  Robert Jay Lifton

  Talking, People, Dying

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• I have for some time urged that a nuclear abolition summit to mark the effective end of the nuclear era be convened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 70th anniversary of the bombings of those cities, with the participation of national leaders and representatives of global civil society.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Anniversary, Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Cities

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• One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh - a process taking (say) 500 years.

  Bertrand Russell

  War, Thinking, Years

  Letter to Gamel Brenan (September 1, 1945), "The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell" edited by Nicholas Griffin, (p. 410), 2002.

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• ...to live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to. Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it (the standard model)? Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value. Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of Einstein's E=MC squared

  Jeanette Winterson

  Lying, Fall, Thinking

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