Albert Camus Quotes
I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. One morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb's admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist's.
Camus, Albert. The Fall. Translated by Justin O'Brien, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 108.
What makes this quote important historically is to realize the assurances that he had to give the press and the public. This shows the level of anxiety about nuclear science that existed at the time and some of the absurd claims that critics and skeptics made. While it was true that there were same dangers in the nuclear testing, some of which the authorities were ignorant of, they were not of the expansive catastrophic magnitude that the critics claimed. Almost all new science and technology develops a Luddite community of opponents who want the technology stopped or at least slowed much. These opponents almost always exaggerate dangers in order to alarm public opinion via fear. At the same time, almost all the new scientific arenas eventually display and disclose problems and potential dangers of which the scientists and policy makers originally unaware. But they are almost always different from those the original critics claim. For example instead of environmental concern for radiation caused mutations in the animal life or the problem of what to do with radioactive byproducts of making atomic weapons, the warnings were that the water would flow out of the oceans and that gravity would be nullified.
Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44 in 1957, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.
