Hiroshima Quotes - Page 2

• When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.

  Wilfred Burchett

  Men, Squares, Giving

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• I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey's Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Eye, Blood

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• I did not know much history when I became a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Only after the War did I see that we, like the Nazis, had committed atrocities... Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, my own bombing missions. And when I studied history after the War, I learned from reading on my own, not from my university classes, about the history of U.S. expansion and imperialism.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Reading, Air

  "Zinn Speaks". Interview with Wajahat Ali, www.counterpunch.org. April 19, 2008.

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• You can't do anything with anybody's body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person - you can do only one thing to make it dirty: kill it. Hiroshima was dirty.

  Lenny Bruce

  Dirty, Compassion, Eight

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• Could we have avoided the tragedy of Hiroshima? Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands? No one knows. No one can find out.

  Edward Teller

  Hands, Tragedy, Clean

  Edward Teller, Allen Brown, Jr. (1975). “The Legacy of Hiroshima”, Greenwood Press

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• When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States struck back. She didn't go and bomb - she bombed any part of Japan. She dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Those people in Hiroshima probably hadn't even, some of them; most of them hadn't even killed anybody.

  Malcolm X

  Japan, People, United States

  Interview with Robert Penn Warren, whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu. June 2, 1964.

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• When I was a kid, I have two dreams. I want to be a baseball player. Hometown, Hiroshima, has a Japanese baseball franchise team called Hiroshima Carps. You know, and then I want to be a sushi chef. I want to make own restaurant - sushi restaurant.

  Masaharu Morimoto

  Baseball, Dream, Team

  "Talk Asia", www.cnn.com. February 11, 2012.

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• As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide.

  Martin Van Creveld

  Suicide, War, Struggle

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• Berlin seems like a place of healing to me though: you have both the Holocaust Memorial and Hiroshima Strasse side-by-side there. You have the whole last century libraried and you can see exactly what we did. Now there's lots of artists and musicians moving there because they can't afford the rent in London and New York, and they're having children and making it a gentle place. It seems to be a place of hope now.

  Robert Montgomery

  New York, Children, Moving

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Awful, Surrender

  Newsweek, p. 107, November 11, 1963.

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• The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city.

  Wilfred Burchett

  Cities, Police, Firsts

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• The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?

  John Hersey

  Spiritual, War, Evil

  John Hersey (2015). “Hiroshima [Illustrated Edition]”, p.31, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• Because my parents were American missionaries who sent me to public schools in rural Japan, I had to confront Hiroshima as a child. I was in the fourth grade - the only American in my class - when our teacher wrote the words "America" and "Atomic Bomb" in white chalk on the blackboard. All forty Japanese children turned around to stare at me. My country had done something unforgivable and I had to take responsibility for it, all by myself. I desperately wanted to dig a hole under my desk, to escape my classmates' mute disbelief and never have to face them again.

  Linda Hoaglund

  Country, Teacher, Children

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.

  Bruce Sterling

  D Day, Literature, Berlin

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• My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.

  Wilfred Burchett

  Responsibility, Emotional, Intellectual

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• The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret: every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.

  Eduardo Galeano

  Latin, Years, America

  "Eduardo Galeano, leading voice of Latin American left, dies aged 74" by Ashifa Kassam, Sam Jones, www.theguardian.com. April 13, 2015.

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• The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  People, Soul, Aftermath

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• Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.

  Wilfred Burchett

  Profound, Effects

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• What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Death, Men, Cities

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• The most racist, nastiest act by America, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I'm glad I'm not a scientist because I'd feel so guilty now.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Children, Military, Men

  Source: www.sharedhost.progressive.org

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• 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

  Technology, Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Discovery

  Joseph Rotblat, Daisaku Ikeda (2007). “A Quest for Global Peace: Rotblat and Ikeda on War, Ethics and the Nuclear Threat”, p.129, I.B.Tauris

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• In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.

  Wilfred Burchett

  Cities, People, Dying

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• Nuclear weapons are inherently threatening to all of civilization. If that had been a nuclear weapon at the World Trade Center, even the most primitive kind of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you wouldn't have a Manhattan. There wouldn't be a democracy of any kind in America.

  Robert Scheer

  Civilization, America, Democracy

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.

  John Fowles

  Girl, Thinking, Singing

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• The increase in the amount of heat in the oceans amounts to 17 x 10^22 Joules over the last 30 years. That is so much energy it is equivalent to exploding a Hiroshima bomb every second in the ocean for thirty years.

  Stefan Rahmstorf

  Ocean, Years, Lasts

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