First Atomic Bomb Quotes

#1. Before the first atomic bomb test, scientists took the time to calculate whether the blast would ignite the nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere and incinerate us all. The risk was low and the test went off, but Rees wonders what the odds would have had to be to discourage the bomb makers.

Dennis Overbye

#2. 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

#3. The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.

Henry H. Arnold

#4. Usually life's greatest gifts come wrapped in adversity.

Richard Paul Evans

#5. The ginkgo tree is from the era of dinosaurs, but while the dinosaur has been extinguished, the modern ginkgo has not changed. After the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the ginkgo was the first tree that came up. It's amazing.

Koji Nakanishi

#6. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

Wilfred Burchett

#7. The privilege and pleasure That we treasure beyond measure Is to run on little errands for the Ministers of State.

W.S. Gilbert

#8. Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn't know that mankind has enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the fucking plant to pieces.

John Cheever

#9. The dropping of the Atomic Bomb is a very deep problem ... Instead of commemorating Hiroshima we should celebrate ... man's triumph over the problem [of transmutation], and not its first misuse by politicians and military authorities.

Frederick Soddy

#10. May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

Henry David Thoreau

#11. What arises in our experience is much less important than how we relate to what arises in our experience.

Sharon Salzberg

#12. Not everybody you disagree with is going to attack you for it.

Nancy Rue

#13. The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.

Tom Waits

#14. The atomic bomb which we dropped on the people of Hiroshima was first envisioned by a woman, not a man. She was, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She didn't call it an "atomic bomb." She called it "the monster of Frankenstein.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#15. There's only two ways to be completely alone in this world, lost in a crowd or in total isolation ...

Jeff Lemire