Friedrich Durrenmatt Quotes
Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.
Dürrenmatt, Friedrich. The Physicists. Translated by James Kirkup, Grove Press, 1964, p. 79.
Many Roosevelt haters claimed that the President was plotting to have America enter the European war even at this time. Mrs. Roosevelt was a strong anti-war voice at the time. As hard as it is for us to imagine today, while her husband was President of the United States, the First Lady wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column every single day with politics frequently the subject. While she usually agreed with the President, there were occasions where they seemed to not see things exactly the same. She tended to be more liberal than he. However, there were those who believed that when she criticized politicians, it was with FDR’s knowledge and blessing and she sometimes did his “dirty work.” Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most influential people in the country—certainly more-so than any First Lady before and since.
There is a conceptually similar African proverb where the animals change. See {588445}.
Einstein saw the war as madness but what distressed him most was that his friend and colleague, Fritz Haber, to help the war effort developed poison chlorine gas as a weapon which killed and maimed hundreds of thousands. He was a devoted pacifist thereafter. It took an even greater madman like Adolf Hitler and his Nazis to reach the mental point where he recommended to President Roosevelt that scientists develop an atomic bomb.
Kennen, one of the great American wise men for foreign affairs, could not have predicted the outcome of the Iraq war any better.
See Hans Bethe {628530} for a practical implication of this principle.
This quotation not only illustrates the discomfort of the atomic scientists who developed the atomic bomb regarding the ethics and decision making regarding use, but also how complex a man Teller himself was. Here he sounds like a left-leaning centrist. A little later he would side with the hawks in the military and the political world and slander his colleague Oppenheimer publicly advocating an arms race and the development of the hydrogen bomb when the existing technology of the atom bomb could wipe out Russia or any other nation. His new allies however kept everything about nuclear weapons a secret and thus the public could never weigh in and influence any nuclear decision making. This state existed until President Eisenhower declassified much of the nuclear weapons information as part of his Atoms for Peace program.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophical crime novels, and macabre satire. Dürrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten, a group of left-wing Swiss writers who convened regularly at a restaurant in the city of Olten.
