Lise Meitner Quotes

During my participation in the Manhattan Project and subsequent research at Los Alamos, encompassing a period of fifteen years, I worked in the company of perhaps the greatest collection of scientific talent the world has ever known.

The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?

There's an amazing documentary, 'The Day After Trinity,' which is crazy good.

I also was producing, working on other materials for the hydrogen bomb. They call it lithium-6 and tritium. I was working on these and the only use for lithium-6 is the hydrogen bomb.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is my hometown. In Los Alamos is, for people who don't know, a nuclear lab that built the atomic bomb. The only reason the town exists is to make nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, and that's still happening there.

In the past, science has often been able to provide adequate protection against new weapons it has given into the hands of an aggressor, but it cannot promise such efficient protection against the destructive use of nuclear power

There was nothing I knew that would indicate that if we could do it [create an atomic bomb], they [the Germans] couldn’t do it. Therefore I thought it was very important to try and cooperate. I felt I should do it in order to protect civilization. …

When fission was first discovered, within perhaps a week, there was on the blackboard of Robert Oppenheimer’s office a drawing—a very bad … drawing of a [atomic] bomb.

Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists. With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.

As someone remarked, when told the new atomic bombs would explode without a bang, "they can't leave anything alone."

Thank God for the bomb. Nuke ya, nuke ya.

The mystique associated with the bomb, the role that scientists played in it, and its general importance could not fail to impress even a six-year old.

In 1947 I defended my thesis on nuclear physics, and in 1948 I was included in a group of research scientists whose task was to develop nuclear weapons.

The Atomic Age is here to stay - but are we?

I think the Bravo test is really important for a number of reasons. It's kind of symbolic. It raises a lot of the issues that are related to the whole controversy over nuclear testing.

My piece in One World or None was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City.

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret.

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.

The atomic issue was a natural path into political issues.

The only reason to treat nuclear power differently from all the other developments in the field of physics is its staggering possibilities as a means of political pressure in peace and sudden destruction in war.

I don't know why people are always afraid of a nuclear blast.

We'll eat grass, but we'll make a nuclear bomb.

In the past, scientists could disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind had put their disinterested discoveries. We cannot take the same attitude now because the success which we have achieved in the development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely greater dangers than were all the inventions of the past.