Hiroshima Quotes

“If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of worlds.

[Quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“We are the centuries... We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient impregnated) artifacts. We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do – Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve and a traveling salesman called Lucifer. We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries. Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s slap, seek manhood, taste a little godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb: (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.) Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens – and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH! – an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“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.”
― Victor E Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“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.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.

This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.

But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. ”
― David Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence: Essays

“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

– John Hersey, quoted in Fallout by Lesley Blume”
― John Hersey

“It starts with a thwack, the sharp crack of hard plastic against a hot metal surface. When the ladle rolls over, it deposits a pale-yellow puddle of batter onto the griddle. A gentle sizzle, as the back of the ladle sparkles a mixture of eggs, flour, water, and milk across the silver surface. A crepe takes shape.
Next comes cabbage, chopped thin- but not too thin- and stacked six inches high, lightly packed so hot air can flow freely and wilt the mountain down to a molehill. Crowning the cabbage comes a flurry of tastes and textures: ivory bean sprouts, golden pebbles of fried tempura batter, a few shakes of salt, and, for an extra umami punch, a drift of dried bonito powder. Finally, three strips of streaky pork belly, just enough to umbrella the cabbage in fat, plus a bit more batter to hold the whole thing together. With two metal spatulas and a gentle rocking of the wrists, the mass is inverted. The pork fat melts on contact, and the cabbage shrinks in the steam trapped under the crepe.
Then things get serious. Thin wheat soba noodles, still dripping with hot water, hit the teppan, dancing like garden hoses across its hot surface, absorbing the heat of the griddle until they crisp into a bird's nest to house the cabbage and crepe. An egg with two orange yolks sizzles beside the soba, waiting for its place on top of this magnificent heap.
Everything comes together: cabbage and crepe at the base, bean sprouts and pork belly in the center, soba and fried egg parked on top, a geologic construction of carbs and crunch, protein and chew, all framed with the black and white of thickened Worcestershire and a zigzag of mayonnaise.
This is okonomiyaki, the second most famous thing that ever happened to Hiroshima.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“As Japan recovered from the post-war depression, okonomiyaki became the cornerstone of Hiroshima's nascent restaurant culture. And with new variables- noodles, protein, fishy powders- added to the equation, it became an increasingly fungible concept. Half a century later it still defies easy description. Okonomi means "whatever you like," yaki means "grill," but smashed together they do little to paint a clear picture. Invariably, writers, cooks, and oko officials revert to analogies: some call it a cabbage crepe; others a savory pancake or an omelet. Guidebooks, unhelpfully, refer to it as Japanese pizza, though okonomiyaki looks and tastes nothing like pizza. Otafuku, for its part, does little to clarify the situation, comparing okonomiyaki in turn to Turkish pide, Indian chapati, and Mexican tacos.
There are two overarching categories of okonomiyaki Hiroshima style, with a layer of noodles and a heavy cabbage presence, and Osaka or Kansai style, made with a base of eggs, flour, dashi, and grated nagaimo, sticky mountain yam. More than the ingredients themselves, the difference lies in the structure: whereas okonomiyaki in Hiroshima is carefully layered, a savory circle with five or six distinct layers, the ingredients in Osaka-style okonomiyaki are mixed together before cooking. The latter is so simple to cook that many restaurants let you do it yourself on table side teppans. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is complicated enough that even the cooks who dedicate their lives to its construction still don't get it right most of the time. (Some people consider monjayaki, a runny mass of meat and vegetables popularized in Tokyo's Tsukishima district, to be part of the okonomiyaki family, but if so, it's no more than a distant cousin.)
Otafuku entered the picture in 1938 as a rice vinegar manufacturer. Their original factory near Yokogawa Station burned down in the nuclear attack, but in 1946 they started making vinegar again. In 1950 Otafuku began production of Worcestershire sauce, but local cooks complained that it was too spicy and too thin, that it didn't cling to okonomiyaki, which was becoming the nutritional staple of Hiroshima life. So Otafuku used fruit- originally orange and peach, later Middle Eastern dates- to thicken and sweeten the sauce, and added the now-iconic Otafuku label with the six virtues that the chubby-cheeked lady of Otafuku, a traditional character from Japanese folklore, is supposed to represent, including a little nose for modesty, big ears for good listening, and a large forehead for wisdom.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Around one hundred thousand people died in Hiroshima. Why did we think so little of their freedom? What have we done for the hibakusha since?”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“I can imagine you, Shun and Nozomi, having read this far, thinking 'but will making one little story into a picture really be able to express a problem so huge?' This world is made up of little stories. Those modest daily lives, those lives that may seem insignificant, they give the world shape — that's what I believe. Don't you think that presenting small stories in details is precisely the most certain way to depict huge things?”
― Shaw Kuzki, Soul Lanterns

“In a future war the victorious side will dictate the peace to the defeated side in the exact manner described above. This stems from the nature of modern weapons. Such weapons are made to produce decisive results. They are made to engender capitulation and stop all arguments, all negotiations, all half-measures. Atomic bombs were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The result was the surrender of Japan. Diplomatic power is weak when compared to atomic power. In fact, the illusions of diplomatic power must work against those states that favor negotiation over and above measures strictly undertaken to assure military success.”
― J.R.Nyquist

“Russians in their hour of victory really hoped that their long isolation had ended; that their terrible war losses had brought for them the friendship of America and Britain, with long generations of peace. Week by week I saw that hope die in their faces. The change began with our atom-bomb on Hiroshima. Fear came back into eyes that had hardly yet seen peace. After the fear came the thought: Why had America slain a quarter of a million people in two Japanese cities, when Japan was already suing for peace?”
― Anna Louise Strong, The Stalin era

“How cruel the atomic bomb is to an innocent child, Sensei.”
― Kyoko Iriye Selden

“Wie van de toekomstige generaties
zal kunnen begrijpen
dat we opnieuw in duisternis vervallen zijn
na het licht te hebben gezien?”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“That was the first time Nozomi realized that regardless of which type of hibaku people experienced, they were living their lives in fear of an enemy they couldn't see.”
― Shaw Kuzki, Soul Lanterns

“So many people's fates were changed by the flash. Many of those who survived physically were dead inside.”
― Shaw Kuzki, Soul Lanterns

“It’s odd seeing a thing in the real world that you’ve only looked upon before virtually. The dome doesn’t seem real, not at first anyway. But what’s more striking is the thought that I’m standing almost right in the centre of where the world’s first atomic bomb detonated. All around us today there’s life, but if we were here just over a hundred years ago, we’d have been vaporised instantly. And though I can move freely through these streets today, if I were here but a day before the bomb, everyone around would have seen me as the enemy. And I probably would have seen them as the enemy, too. Yet now we pass each other with no particular notice, much less any ill will.”
― Michael Grothaus, Beautiful Shining People

“When my eyes return to earth, they cross Neotnia, her bangs gently fluttering in the breeze as she peers at the dome’s rusted arches crisscrossing each other like a crown of thorns. It feels like she’s gazing upon the skull of the twentieth century. Like it’s the remnant of some giant, horrible beast from a more primitive and violent era.”
― Michael Grothaus, Beautiful Shining People

“Approaching the Cenotaph again, we stop so a group of school-children can stand for an unobstructed photo by the shallow memorial pool.

Each holds a paper crane in their hands, and they all look so proud. It reminds me of the class photograph from 1945. The children in today’s class also look no older than five or six, and their smiles beam just as bright. And hearing their laughter as the teacher tries to get them to settle long enough to take the photo, I recall something Mom said years after she returned from Angola: ‘No matter what language you speak or what nationality you are, tears and laughter always sound the same.”
― Michael Grothaus, Beautiful Shining People

“But as the document of record – read over years by millions around the world – graphically showing what nuclear warfare truly looks like, and what atomic bombs do to humans, “Hiroshima” has played a major role in preventing nuclear war since the end of World War II. In 1946, Hersey’s story was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilisation. It has since helped motivate generations of activists and leaders to prevent nuclear war, which would likely end the brief human experiment on earth. We know what atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us. Since the release of “Hiroshima,” no leader or party could threaten nuclear action without an absolute knowledge of the horrific results of such an attack.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Upon hearing the news about Hiroshima, Hersey was immediately overwhelmed by a sense of despair.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Hiroshima was a decimated “death laboratory” littered with the corpses of “human guinea pigs”…”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“…Hiroshima terrified Hersey from the moment he arrived; the fact that a single bomb had caused this destruction would torment him throughout the duration of his assignment.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“After the war, the Germans had professed that they hadn’t known what happened in their concentration camps, the editorial pointed out; Americans were now in a comparable position and looked like “amoral fools.” Hiroshima had not been treated as a crime because it was a victor’s handiwork.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Hiroshima had become the document of record about the true human cost of nuclear war, and was destined to remain so for decades.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Humanitarian Nuclear Physics (The Sonnet)

One nuclear warhead contains 9 lbs of plutonium,
Which can electrify 2000 households for a year.
Yet you use that majestic power of atom as pawn,
In your stoneage geopolitical games of fear.

When monkeys crack the mystery of the atom,
Without developing any civilized purpose,
They go blind with the madness of power,
Atom bombs become newage arrows and spears.

Hypnotized by the mindless pursuit of "could",
Apes rarely ever stop to question if they should!
What good is such science without conscience,
What good is a scientist without a vision for good!

Either atom bombs will be obsolete as bow and arrow,
Or humankind will go extinct like dinosaurs tomorrow.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“One nuclear warhead contains 9 lbs of plutonium,
Which can electrify 2000 households for a year.
Yet you use that majestic power of atom as pawn,
In your stoneage geopolitical games of fear.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“¡Qué ben, que a bomba ven co seu rebombio!
A bomba, ¡bong!, a bomba, bon amigo,
A bomba con aramios, con formigas,
con fornos pra asar meniños loiros.
A bomba ten lombrices, bombardinos,
vermes de luz, bombillas fluorescentes,
peixes de chumbo, vómitos, anémonas,
estrelas de plutonio plutocrático,
esterco de cobalto hidroxenado,
martelos, ferraduras, matarratos.

A bomba, bong. A bomba, bon amigo.
Con átomos que estoupan en cadeia
e creban as cadeias que nos atan:

Os outos edificios.
Os outos funcionarios.
Os outos fiñanceiros.
Os outos ideais.
¡Todo será borralla radioaitiva!

As estúpidas nais que pairen fillos
polvo serán, mais polvo namorado.

Os estúpidos pais, as prostitutas,
as grandes damas da beneficencia,
magnates e mangantes, grandes cruces,
altezas, escelencias, eminencias,
cabaleiros cubertos, descubertos,
nada serán meu ben, si a bomba ven,
nada o amor, e nada a morte morta
con bendiciós e plenas indulxencias.

¡Qué ben, que a bomba ven! Nun instantiño
amable primavera faise cinza
de vagos isotopos placentarios,
de letales surrisas derretidas
baixo un arco de átomos triunfaes.

A bomba, ¡bong! a bomba co seu bombo
de setas e volutas abombadas,
axiña ven, vela ahí ven, bon amigo.

¡Estános ben! ¡Está ben! ¡Está bon!

¡¡¡Booong!!!”
― Celso Emilio Ferreiro, O Soño Sulagado