Great Throughts Treasury

"Chain reaction is popularly associated with the atomic bomb, but it is no less gigantic a force in your daily life. Every word you speak, every action you perform sets up a chain of reaction that can end in a damaging explosion or a shower of blessings." - Harold S. Kahm

"We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"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." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer

"Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and [as yet] undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?" - James W. Douglass

"Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking." - Albert Einstein

"The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness." - Vannevar Bush