Wilfred Burchett Quotes

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.

Being here, it is just impossible to imagine what that was like, when the tsunami hit.

The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.

We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.

What I was trying to convey there was the kind of waste land that was left after the war. It was a bit like one always thinks of war, you know, stark scenery and no birds, no trees, no leaves, nothing living. And just emptiness.

War is the easiest photography in the business. Just get close, be lucky, know how your camera works. There are subjects everywhere. Everyplace you go, there is something to photograph in a war, like being in the middle of a hurricane or a train crash or an earthquake. You can't miss it.

Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.

Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.

The pictures we saw before we got down here didn't even touch the reality of what it is like being here. We can be right on the beach with all the devastation and still not be able to imagine what it was like when the wall of water actually came up.

Hundreds and hundreds of the dead were so badly burned in the terrific heat generated by the bomb that it was not even possible to tell whether they were men or women, old or young.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

We came back right over the World Trade Center and could see, even from that altitude, the devastation, the smoke that was coming up. It was obvious it was going to be horrible.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God, I'm still alive.' But, of course, those who died, their lives will never be the same again.

War is hell.

I watched the Trade Center buildings go down from my balcony, and it was a terrifying moment. I couldn't get my mind around it at all.

War is devastating, and it leaves its scars for generations.

I saw my hometown burning that day.

War is a defeat for humanity.

It makes twenty years or more of peace to make a man. It takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.