Richard Rhodes Quotes

#1. Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night.

Richard Rhodes

#2. Inventions are rarely just a sudden bright idea. Even if they are, they usually have antecedents in the form of pieces of the idea ... Piecing these things together gives one a sense of where inventions come from, and that's interesting.

Richard Rhodes

#3. It was "not so much the [lack of] leisure, but also the nervous tension. One comes back to one's native land and sees that one has been abandoned." - Antheil

Richard Rhodes

#4. Fermi thought plutonium production needed an area a mile wide and two miles long for safety. Compton proposed building piles of increasing power to work up to full-scale production and was considering alternative sites in the Lake Michigan Dunes area and in the Tennessee Valley.

Richard Rhodes

#5. Of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.

Richard Rhodes

#6. I think I want to write a biography, something with broad appeal, but I haven't figured out about whom.

Richard Rhodes

#7. I've puzzled over the difficulty that students have with editing, and I think I've identified its source: It's their self-talk. We all talk to ourselves, inside our heads. That's what consciousness is.

Richard Rhodes

#8. Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed.

Richard Rhodes

#9. The world is full of terrible suffering, compared to which the small inconveniences of my childhood are as a drop of rain in the sea.

Richard Rhodes

#10. There was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.

Richard Rhodes

#11. Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.

Richard Rhodes

#12. Many novice writers, students in particular, think that writing is little more than copying down their self-talk, the palaver of the voices they hear in their heads. Of course, self-talk is thinking, and writing begins with thinking.

Richard Rhodes

#13. Was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.

Richard Rhodes

#14. another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation - from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.

Richard Rhodes

#15. About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.

Richard Rhodes

#16. The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer's vocabulary - Fermi was only then inventing that specialty - but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city.

Richard Rhodes

#17. Einstein was arguing against quantum theory just as irrationally as his opponents had argued against relativity theory. Einstein remained adamant (he remained adamant to the end of his life where quantum theory was concerned).

Richard Rhodes

#18. Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements
and this is untrue.

Richard Rhodes

#19. Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; ... fully half of us are alive today because of the improvements.

Richard Rhodes

#20. when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing - a very bad, an execrable drawing - of a bomb.

Richard Rhodes

#21. They all thought that civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening." Szilard held no such sanguine view, noting that the Germans themselves were paralyzed with cynicism, one of the uglier effects on morals of losing a major war.

Richard Rhodes

#22. Writing is a craft and, like all craft, proceeds by stages: conception, material selection, rough shaping, detailed shaping, sanding and finishing.

Richard Rhodes

#23. I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi . . . when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.

Richard Rhodes