Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction; but the remote possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this even the whole of the hydrogen on the earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.
— Francis Aston, from his Nobel Lecure, December 12, 1922
There are those of us [scientists, physicists mainly] who say that such research [into the atom’s releasable energy] should be stopped by law, alleging that man’s destructive powers are already large enough. So, no doubt, the more elderly and ape-like of our prehistoric ancestors objected to the innovation of cooked food and pointed out the grave dangers attending the use of the newly discovered agency, fire. Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.
— Francis Aston, from a 1936 lecture
I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933. […] The train was empty. The same train the next day was overcrowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. That just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.
— Leó Szilárd, quoted in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes.
The man [just shot and killed by Twain and his fellow soldiers] was not in uniform and was not armed. He was a stranger in the country, that was all we ever found out about him. The thought of him got to preying on me every night, I could not get rid of it. I could not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing. And it seemed the epitome of war, that all war must be the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity, strangers who in other circumstances you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.
— Mark Twain, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”
With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around … when yellow will be mellow … when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.
— Reverand Joseph Lowery, from his benediction during President Barack Obama’s inauguration
In the early hours after midnight, Chernobyl Reactor Number Four had run away in four seconds from 7 percent of maximum rated power to about one hundred times maximum rated power, an event called a prompt critical excursion that had flashed the reactor’s thousands of gallons of circulating water to high pressure steam.
— Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
