Alva Myrdal Quotes

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

Human civilization as we know it is like the Titanic headed for the iceberg, whether the iceberg be nuclear, environmental or terrorism-related.

This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.

Not only may our own culture be destroyed by these weapons of mass destruction, but all civilizations as they exist in the world may be retarded and weakened for centuries to come. It all adds up to the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced in all history

We can’t blow up the world because of it.

The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.

It doesn't take a military genius to see we'll all be crispy critters after World War III.

A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes...could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors-as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, 'the survivors would envy the dead.' For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors.

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.

The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.

It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime.

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.

My own judgment of how the world is gonna end is that there will be a country led by a madman that will build a nuclear bomb with so much force, so much power, that it will be dropped somewhere on the face of this earth and that the earth will lose its place.

The end of the world is on people's minds. We have the power to destroy or save ourselves, but the question is what do you do with that responsibility.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself—either in a fit of complete lunacy ... or by a careless handling of atomic technology, through the slow poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.

We may well blow each other up with atomic weapons before we wipe out all species of life including our own with more gradual means.

The overarching problem is one of the survival of humanity in the face of the growing nuclear menace. If those bombs go off, nothing else would matter.

We need to make sure that the Voyager probes carrying a record of human civilization speeding beyond our solar system remain an introduction to the world that sent them and not an epitaph for a civilization that caused its own ruin.

If I had to predict, the way things are going, I'd say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct or nearly extinct within 50 years. Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.

The world has been close to war before - but now man, who has survived all previous threats to his existence, has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over.