These Hiroshima quotes will inspire you. Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Hiroshima quotes, Hiroshima sayings, and Hiroshima proverbs.
Best Hiroshima Quotes
- “Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.” ~ Pablo Picasso
- “If I had foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would have torn up my formula in 1905.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.” ~ Pablo Picasso
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“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.” ~ John Hersey
- “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people must unite or they will perish.” ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer
- “Japan learned from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the tragedy wrought by nuclear weapons must never be repeated and that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” ~ Daisaku Ikeda
- “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.” ~ Wilfred Burchett
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“Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.” ~ George Wald
- “Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity –
what’s wrong with that? I’ll tell you what’s wrong – a series of unprecedented
horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores,
the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt.” ~ William S. Burroughs - “Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “Non-violence … is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy. I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima. On the contrary, I said to myself, Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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“So far as I can see the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes – except that there were no ashes.” ~ Wilfred Burchett
- “We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.” ~ Edward Bond
- “Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ George Santayana
- “If you encounter a human shadow burned permanently into the concrete in Hiroshima, you realize that this is the trace of a very ordinary person now elevated into the emblematic. Time, shame, complicity, or discomfort are the only things that make us pretend History is impersonal or far removed from the power and consequences of our every lived moment.” ~ Chris Abani
- “Wars cannot be won by destroying women and children” ~ William D. Leahy
- “The city of Hiroshima stands as more than a monument to massive death and destruction. It stands as a living testament to the necessity for progress toward nuclear disarmament.” ~ Edward Kennedy , Hiroshima quotes about death
- “The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.” ~ Noam Chomsky
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“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” ~ Herbert Hoover
- “The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons… The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” ~ William D. Leahy , Hiroshima quotes about bombing
- “I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
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“I was a bombadier in WW 2. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not til I read Hersey’s Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.” ~ Wilfred Burchett
- “I think that in poetry personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.” ~ Sylvia Plath
- “I did not know much history when I became a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Only after the War did I see that we, like the Nazis, had committed atrocities… Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, my own bombing missions. And when I studied history after the War, I learned from reading on my own, not from my university classes, about the history of U.S. expansion and imperialism.” ~ Howard Zinn
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“You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person – you can do only one thing to make it dirty: kill it. Hiroshima was dirty.” ~ Lenny Bruce
- “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.” ~ Edward Teller
- “I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States struck back. She didn’t go and bomb – she bombed any part of Japan. She dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Those people in Hiroshima probably hadn’t even, some of them; most of them hadn’t even killed anybody.” ~ Malcolm X
- “When I was a kid, I have two dreams. I want to be a baseball player. Hometown, Hiroshima, has a Japanese baseball franchise team called Hiroshima Carps. You know, and then I want to be a sushi chef. I want to make own restaurant – sushi restaurant.” ~ Masaharu Morimoto
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“As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide.” ~ Martin Van Creveld
- “Berlin seems like a place of healing to me though: you have both the Holocaust Memorial and Hiroshima Strasse side-by-side there. You have the whole last century libraried and you can see exactly what we did. Now there’s lots of artists and musicians moving there because they can’t afford the rent in London and New York, and they’re having children and making it a gentle place. It seems to be a place of hope now.” ~ Robert Montgomery
- “The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city.” ~ Wilfred Burchett
- “Because my parents were American missionaries who sent me to public schools in rural Japan, I had to confront Hiroshima as a child. I was in the fourth grade – the only American in my class – when our teacher wrote the words “America” and “Atomic Bomb” in white chalk on the blackboard. All forty Japanese children turned around to stare at me. My country had done something unforgivable and I had to take responsibility for it, all by myself. I desperately wanted to dig a hole under my desk, to escape my classmates’ mute disbelief and never have to face them again.” ~ Linda Hoaglund
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“Well, they didn’t lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it’s just a few large buildings and aircraft, it’s not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.” ~ Bruce Sterling
- “The most racist, nastiest act by America, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.” ~ Kenzaburo Oe
- “What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.” ~ Archibald MacLeish
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“My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.” ~ Wilfred Burchett
- “But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.” ~ Joseph Rotblat
- “Nuclear weapons are inherently threatening to all of civilization. If that had been a nuclear weapon at the World Trade Center, even the most primitive kind of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you wouldn’t have a Manhattan. There wouldn’t be a democracy of any kind in America.” ~ Robert Scheer
- “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.” ~ Wilfred Burchett
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“The increase in the amount of heat in the oceans amounts to 17 x 10^22 Joules over the last 30 years. That is so much energy it is equivalent to exploding a Hiroshima bomb every second in the ocean for thirty years.” ~ Stefan Rahmstorf
- “Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.” ~ James W. Loewen
- “MR. KHARIS: ‘Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?’ MR. CELINE: ‘I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?’ JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: ‘You become facetious, Mr. Celine.’ MR. CELINE: ‘I have never been more serious.” ~ Robert Anton Wilson
- “I happen to love America. I love this freedom and democracy. The fact is we are the ones who killed innocent people, men, women and children, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, weapons that should have never been used, should have never been developed in the first place, you know?” ~ Robert Scheer
- “Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.” ~ Rick Yancey
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“I’m not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don’t know. There’s nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.” ~ Quentin S. Crisp
- “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.” ~ Stewart Udall
- “America is a democracy and has no Hitler, but I am afraid for her future; there are hard times ahead for the American people, troubles will be coming from within and without. America cannot smile away their Negro problem nor Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are cosmic laws.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I’ll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.” ~ Sarah Kay
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“The ginkgo tree is from the era of dinosaurs, but while the dinosaur has been extinguished, the modern ginkgo has not changed. After the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the ginkgo was the first tree that came up. It’s amazing.” ~ Koji Nakanishi
- “We cannot and must not allow ourselves to have the message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fade completely from our minds, and we cannot allow our vision or ideals to fade, either. For if we do, we have but one course left for us. And that flash of light will not only rob us of our vision, but it will rob us of our lives, our progeny, and our very existence.” ~ Tadatoshi Akiba
- “The death toll from small arms dwarfs that of all other weapons systems — and in most years greatly exceeds the toll of the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In terms of the carnage they cause, small arms, indeed, could well be described as ‘weapons of mass destruction’.” ~ Kofi Annan
- “Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life – on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state – must be cast in the language of human rights.” ~ Jonathan Sacks
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“We dropped two bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the name of the plane that delivered the weapons was the Enola Gay. Do you know why? Because we wanted them to know that they were about to get boned in the ass.” ~ Carlos Mencia
- “I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page looks like “aware,” which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there, what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our relations.” ~ Terry Tempest Williams
- “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” ~ Paul Nitze
- “Having the equivalent of 150,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs at the ready does nothing to protect us from terrorists planning to sneak in a bomb through a cargo container.” ~ Ben Cohen
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“When doctors describe pain as experiencing “discomfort,” it’s like saying Hiroshima experienced “urban renewal”.” ~ Dave Barry
- “I had been conscious a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [Secretary Of War Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.'” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “It’s a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.” ~ John Hersey
- “Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.” ~ John Hersey
