Walker Percy Quotes
Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
Percy, Walker. Love in the Ruins. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, p. 7.
The moral imperative of submission rather than allowing a war started by the aggressor, logical for Pizarro and Church leaders of the time, is the same logic of aggressors from Adolf Hitler to Saddam Hussein.
This is an important historical quotation because earlier most people attributed anything they did not understand to God, the Gods, devils, demons, spirits, etc. Simply admitting that the reasons are unknown was quite difficult for centuries, Even today many people find accepting temporary ignorance difficult. One basic initial step in science is identifying the unknown and studying and researching to make it known.
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb. After the development of the atomic bomb there were great pressures on the involved scientists to downplay the dangers of nuclear weapons development. The weapons developer arm of the government was anxious not to frighten the public which might call for more oversight or even limitation of development and testing. Equally important was the scientists themselves who understood the forces that they had unleashed and were worried that if the public realized the worst of the possibilities, science and scientific research itself might be in jeopardy from a new Luddite reaction. Oppenheimer urged candor with the public. Most scientists took his advice but the Atomic Energy Commission had become politicized and when Oppenheimer went public with his and others scientific concerns they punished him by calling him a security risk and withdrawing his clearance thus cutting him off from new developments and discrediting him and his views at the same time.
Walker Percy, Obl.S.B. was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first novel, The Moviegoer, won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
