Top 100 Quotes About The Atom
#1. Energy is the measure of that which passes from one atom to another in the course of their transformations. A unifying power, then, but also, because the atom appears to become enriched or exhausted in the course of the exchange, the expression of structure.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#2. The electromagnetic attraction between negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in the nucleus causes the electrons to orbit the nucleus of the atom, just as gravitational attraction causes the earth to orbit the sun.
Stephen Hawking
#3. [Misquotation; not by Einstein.] If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. [Apparently remorseful for his role in the development of the atom bomb.]
Albert Einstein
#4. Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split.
Robinson Jeffers
#5. The trouble with science geeks, as you call them, is that hey put discovery before anything else. It was a science geek who discovered the atom bomb. He didn't intend to cause mass murder, but he did nonetheless.
Gemma Malley
#6. There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.
Paul Dirac
#7. I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened.
Lanford Wilson
#8. Nuclear scientists lost their innocence when we used the atom bomb for the very first time. So we could argue computer scientists lost their innocence in 2009 when we started using malware as an offensive attack weapon.
Mikko Hypponen
#9. It would not become physical science to see in its self created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena ... The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena.
Ernst Mach
#11. Everything that we perceive around us is struggling towards freedom, from the atom to the man, from the insentient, lifeless particle of matter to the highest existence on earth, the human soul. The whole universe is in fact the result of this struggle for freedom.
Swami Vivekananda
#12. The removal of an electron from the surface of an atom - that is, the ionization of the atom - means a fundamental structural change in its surface layer.
Johannes Stark
#13. Whoso meditates on the Omniscient, the Ancient, more minute than the atom, yet the Ruler and Upholder of all, Unimaginable, Brilliant like the Sun, beyond the reach of darkness.
Shri Purohit Swami
#14. Non-violence ... is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy. I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima. On the contrary, I said to myself, Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.
Mahatma Gandhi
#15. Peace through superior violence inevitably leads to the atom bomb and all that it stands for.
Mahatma Gandhi
#16. I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
Arthur Eddington
#17. The atom was unleashed in 1946, right when all this stuff was occurring. And the bomb's incredible release of energy and light may have signalled somebody in a dimension which is sharing space with us very closely.
Dwight Schultz
#18. A physicist is the atom's way of knowing about atoms.
George Wald
#19. It's Christmas at Ground Zero The button has been pressed The radio Just let us know That this is not a test Everywhere the atom bombs are droppin It's the end of all humanity No more time for last minute shoppin' It's time to face your final destiny.
Charles Sumner
#20. In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom, and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that?
Lisa Randall
#21. We have progressed so far that we have succeeded in tearing the atom apart; but to reach that point we may also have had to regress in our moral vision of the physical world to a level barely above the insentient.
David Bentley Hart
#22. The scientists split the atom; now the atom is splitting us.
Quentin Reynolds
#23. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.
Mahatma Gandhi
#24. He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.
Walter Isaacson
#25. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm, As is the atom, so is the universe, As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.
Deepak Chopra
#27. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
Omar Nelson Bradley
#28. Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom.
David R. Brower
#29. Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom. One world or none.
Stuart Chase
#30. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul.
Lincoln Steffens
#31. A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
James Lee Burke
#32. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.
We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.
Max Planck
#33. I was actually telling people that - by harnessing the atom - we could enter a new era of unlimited power that would do away with the need to dam our beautiful streams.
David R. Brower
#34. Within a hundred years of physical and chemical science, men will know what the atom is. It is my belief when science reaches this stage, God will come down to earth with His big ring of keys and will say to humanity, 'Gentlemen, it is closing time.'
Marcellin Berthelot
#35. The vortex theory [of the atom] is only a dream. Itself unproven, it can prove nothing, and any speculations founded upon it are mere dreams about dreams.
Lord Kelvin
#36. The Four Ideas: the Word, Time, Space, and the Atom. The ensuing effect is the idea of particles - the innumerable atoms, pair a or anu. These four - the Word, Time, Space, and the Atom - are therefore one and the same, and substantially nothing but mere ideas.
Sri Yukteswar Giri
#37. That is how the atom is split. But what does it mean ? To us who think in terms of practical use it means - Nothing !
Peter Ritchie Calder
#38. The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.
Joseph Campbell
#39. Nothing exists without an atom. The atom is the beginning and the end. It carries all the information. So the atom is God and everything else are just disciples.
Debasish Mridha
#40. Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#41. America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism,
not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that
gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled
ice cream.
Marisha Pessl
#42. Doing small things with love is the atom of bravery.
Mark Nepo
#43. The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
Alfred North Whitehead
#44. Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.
Bill Bryson
#45. I'm not the sort of fellow who does the same thing all the time. I began using a lot of science fiction apparatus. I came out with the atom bomb two years before it was actually used because I read in the paper that a fellow named Nicola Tesla was working on the atom bomb.
Jack Kirby
#46. And he prayed that his family would be protected from the atom bomb disease called leukemia.
Eleanor Coerr
#48. The atom has taught me that the little things do count - most.
Sri Chinmoy
#49. The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.
Mao Tse-tung
#50. At a time when we can split the atom, land on the moon, and decode the human genome, why do 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day?
Charles Wheelan
#51. Mass travel by air may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb.
Juan Trippe
#52. The decision to use the atom bomb on Japanese cities, and the consequent buildup of enormous nuclear arsenals, was made by governments, on the basis of political and military perceptions.
Joseph Rotblat
#53. We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.
Terence McKenna
#54. Humans have learned to split the atom. Instead of killing ten or twenty people with a wooden club, one person can now kill a million just by pushing a button. Is that real change?
Eckhart Tolle
#55. As incarnations go by, the atom gets more complex. That is, your being, the part of you that reincarnates from lifetime to lifetime, the aggregate, grows thicker and denser.
Frederick Lenz
#56. It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#57. The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb.
Rene Magritte
#58. The future of the world, dependent as it is upon atomic energy, requires more understanding and knowledge about the atom.
Willard Libby
#59. An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.
Steven Pinker
#60. Science has taught us how to put the atom to work. But to make it work for good instead of for evil lies in the domain dealing with the principles of human duty. We are now facing a problem more of ethics than physics.
Bernard Baruch
#61. There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.
Harold E. Varmus
#62. Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.
Anthony Doerr
#63. New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements ... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
Jackson Pollock
#64. The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb.
Diana Vreeland
#65. History will never change because of politics or conquests or theories or wars; that's mere repitition, it's been going on since the beginning of time. History will only change when we are able to use the energy of love, just as we use energy of the wind, the seas, the atom.
Paulo Coelho
#66. I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.
D.H. Lawrence
#67. 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
#68. The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.
Daniel Quinn
#69. Even the structure of the atom has been found by the mind. Therefore the mind is subtler than the atom. That which is behind the mind, namely the individual soul, is subtler than the mind.
Ramana Maharshi
#70. You know, 'power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely?' It's the same with powerlessness.
Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. Einstein
said everything had changed since the atom was split,
except the way we think. We have to think anew.
Studs Terkel
#71. We, the atom and I, have been on friendly terms, until recently. I saw in it the key to the deepest secrets of Nature, and it revealed to me the greatness of creation and the Creator.
Max Born
#72. One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.
D.H. Lawrence
#73. We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process.
Svetlana Alexievich
#74. We have here a proof that there is in the atom a fundamental quantity, which increases by regular steps as one passes from one element to the next. This quantity can only be the charge on the central positive nucleus, of the existence of which we already have definite proof.
Henry Moseley
#75. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
George Orwell
#76. The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.
Daniel Mainwaring
#77. Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".
John Gribbin
#78. The atom cannot disobey the law. Whether it is the mental or the physical atom, it must obey the law. "What is the use of [external restraint]?"
Swami Vivekananda
#79. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein
#81. We hope that this honor you have done us will bring the time of further realization of these benefits closer and will help all mankind to live better and be happier through the atom and isotopes.
Willard Libby
#82. In the lab, we could not see or physically describe the mathematical objects that we called quarks, which we suspected were the key to unlocking the dynamics of the strong force that binds together the clump of protons and neutrons at the center of the atom.
David Gross
#83. If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.
Johannes Stark
#84. An external electric field, meeting it and passing through it, affects the negative as much as the positive quanta of the atom, and pushes the former to one side, and the latter in the other direction.
Johannes Stark
#85. Thinking critically is a chore. It does not come naturally or easily. And if the fruits of such efforts are not carefully displayed to young minds, then they will not harvest them. Every school child must be implanted with the wonder of the atom, not the thrall of magic.
Perry DeAngelis
#86. No king or minister could have instructed Newton to discover the law of gravity, for they did not know and could not know that there was such a law to discover. No Treasury official told Fleming to discover penicillin. Nor was Rutherford instructed to split the atom by a certain date ...
C. Northcote Parkinson
#87. Nobody knows how the stand of our knowledge about the atom would be without him. Personally, Bohr is one of the amiable colleagues I have met. He utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who believes himself to be in possession of the truth.
Albert Einstein
#88. Splitting the atom is like trying to shoot a gnat in the Albert Hall at night and using ten million rounds of ammunition on the off chance of getting it. That should convince you that the atom will always be a sink of energy and never a reservoir of energy.
Ernest Rutherford
#89. Every time humans discovered a new resource, or technique for using mass and energy, one side effect has always been pollution. Why should the information age be any different from those of coal, petroleum, or the atom?
David Brin
#90. We are less than atoms, I say, because the atom obeys the law of its being, whereas we in the insolence of our ignorance deny the law of nature. But I have no argument to address to those who have no faith.
Mahatma Gandhi
#91. Each emission of an alpha or beta ray accompanies the transmutation of an atom; the energy communicated to these rays comes from inside the atom.
Irene Joliot-Curie
#92. In the long term, Israel's security rests on only one pillar: the Palestinians' acceptance of the country. It isn't the atom bomb that makes Israel secure.
Daniel Barenboim
#93. With the new weapons like the atom bomb, Russia would have it, too, and use it first. It is a very difficult world. But that trouble is imminent is obvious.
Karl Donitz
#94. It is an anomaly that we can split the atom, but we are nearly powerless to persuade each other to embrace justice.
Gerry Spence
#95. For it goes without saying that this great recognition at this time will aid tremendously our efforts to find the necessarily large funds for the next voyage of exploration farther into the depths of the atom.
Ernest Lawrence
#96. In the forty-five years centered on 1910, the nature of the atom was first understood - partly by shooting pieces of atoms at atoms and watching how they bounce off.
Carl Sagan
#97. Football tactics are rapidly becoming as complicated as the chemical formula for splitting the atom.
Jimmy Greaves
#98. If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.
[Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during World War I.]
Ernest Rutherford
#100. The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.
E.B. White
