Hiroshima Quotes

1. "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."
Author: Bruce Sterling

2. "Japan learned from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the tragedy wrought by nuclear weapons must never be repeated and that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist."
Author: Daisaku Ikeda

3. "The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had been morally conquered by the enemy."
Author: David McReynolds

4. "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace."
Author: David T. Dellinger

5. "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."
Author: Eduardo Galeano

6. "We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history."
Author: Edward Bond

7. "The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed innocent civilians in Dresden and dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets."
Author: Feisal Abdul Rauf

8. "What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children."
Author: Howard Zinn

9. "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) - that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly."
Author: Howard Zinn

10. "35. Not every environment accepts the progress you want to put across. Take a second look at what you dream about, be sure it can progress very well at where you are; Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not fertile grounds for a farmer's dream seeds. Go and relocate!"
Author: Israelmore Ayivor

11. "Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, "When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile."
Author: James D. Bradley

12. "Let me guess," Eric says, "You never meant for it to happen.""Hell, yes, I did. I've wanted her since you two started dating."Surprised, Eric blinks at me, and then even laughs a little. "I know.""You did?""For God's sake, you're about as subtle as Hiroshima, Fitz." He sighs."
Author: Jodi Picoult

13. "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."
Author: John Fowles

14. "What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima."
Author: John Hersey

15. "It was like being born in Germany after World War II, being from Japan after Pearl Harbor, or America after Hiroshima. History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn't change where you were from. But still, you didn't have to stay there."
Author: Kami Garcia

16. "It wasn't that he was a Confederate. Everyone in Gatlin County was related to the wrong side in the War Between the States. We were used to that by now. It was like being born in Germany after World War II, being from Japan after Pearl Harbor, or America after Hiroshima. History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn't change where you were from. But still, you didn't have to stay there. You didn't have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn't have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena. Ethan Carter Wate hadn't, and I couldn't, either."
Author: Kami Garcia

17. "(If God wills it)... the number of angels... may be infinite... Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed. Once upon a time, atoms did not exist. There was no Dalton, no Rutherford. Albert Einstein was nothing more than a theorist, but you only have to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know that things invisible exist and bear great power. The power to destroy. Or the power to create... Atoms and angels, reason and faith... One without the other is less than half as strong and can be a danger to our vitality. Reason is subject to the tests of logic and observable, demonstrable phenomena. Faith is tested by our desire and will. One cannot see faith, just as one cannot pour out hope or love from a beaker. Self-sacrifice and devotion escape the strongest microscope, but such qualities of spirit can be shown and known by us all... And so with God's messengers, more believed than seen, more felt than touched, our angel's exist in open hearts, if we have but faith."
Author: Keith Donohue

18. "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."
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe

19. "Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposed wound inflicted on all mankind."
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe

20. "We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind."
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe

21. "You're so the fucking bomb, you'd level Hiroshima again if you visited."
Author: Kristen Ashley

22. "Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam,"
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

23. "I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

24. "L'hôpital existe à Hiroshima. Comment aurais-je pu éviter de le voir?"
Author: Marguerite Duras

25. "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."
Author: Martin Van Creveld

26. "Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima."
Author: Pablo Picasso

27. "Three Haiku, Two Tanka(Kyoto)CONFIDENCE (after Basho) Clouds murmur darkly, it is a blinding habit— gazing at the moon. TIME OF JOY (after Buson) Spring means plum blossoms and spotless new kimonos for holiday whores. RENDEZVOUS (after Shiki) Once more as I wait for you, night and icy wind melt into cold rain. FOR SATORI In the spring of joy, when even the mud chuckles, my soul runs rabid, snaps at its own bleeding heels, and barks: "What is happiness?" SOMBER GIRL She never saw fire from heaven or hotly fought with God; but her eyes smolder for Hiroshima and the cold death of Buddha."
Author: Philip Appleman

28. "MR. KHARIS: 'Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?'MR. CELINE: 'I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?'JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: 'You become facetious, Mr. Celine.'MR. CELINE: 'I have never been more serious."
Author: Robert Anton Wilson

29. "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."
Author: Robert Jay Lifton

30. "It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it."
Author: Robert Jay Lifton

31. "Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
Author: Ronald Schaffer

32. "Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.So, let us be alert-alert in a twofold sense:Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake."
Author: Viktor E. Frankl

33. "Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes - except that there were no ashes."
Author: Wilfred Burchett

34. "Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence."
Author: Wilfred Burchett

35. "Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me."
Author: Wilfred Burchett

36. "The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city."
Author: Wilfred Burchett

37. "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."
Author: Wilfred Burchett

38. "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."
Author: Wilfred Burchett

Hiroshima Quotes Pictures