Paul Virilio Quotes

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

It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.

Well, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a story... I don't if anybody knows what it is but it was about... in the early days of testing nuclear bombs, that Russia and America happened to test a nuclear bomb at the same moment at different ends of the earth.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

The human and environmental devastation caused by nuclear weapons - whether by testing, mistake or malice - is the very reason we need to eliminate them altogether.

The Atomic Age was born in secrecy, and for two decades after Hiroshima, the high priests of the cult of the atom concealed vital information about the risks to human health posed by radiation. Dr. Alice Stewart, an audacious and insightful medical researcher, was one of the first experts to alert the world to the dangers of low-level radiation.

Could we have avoided the tragedy of Hiroshima? Could we have started the atomic age with clean hands? No one knows. No one can find out.

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

In the shadow of the atomic bomb it has become even more apparent that all men are, indeed, brothers.

Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.

The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right.

Scientology is the only specific (cure) for radiation (atomic bomb) burns.

I will have nothing to do with a bomb! [Response to being invited (1943) to work with Otto Robert Frisch and some British scientists at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.]

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.

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

In the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the U.S. government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history.

Japan is the only country in the world which suffered from the scourge of nuclear weapons.

A nuclear weapon is not just a football that you can use at will.

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

We should know how many defective children are being born because of the [nuclear] bomb tests.

Each nuclear bomb test spreads an added burden of radioactive elements over every part of the world. Each added amount of radiation causes damage to the health of human beings all over the world and causes damage to the pool of human germ plasma such as to lead to an increase in the number of seriously defective children that will be born in future generations.

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

The combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons can destroy nations.

In my school as a young girl, they taught us that we would be protected from the atomic bomb if we got under the desk.