The Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Inc. "Preserving, Exhibiting, Interpreting and Teaching the History of the Manhattan Project"

This Month's Incredible Quote

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

Below are a few quotes that visitors have sent us.  If you have or know of a quote, please go to the bottom of this page and send it to us.  We will include it here.  Thanks.

• “In every investigation, in every extension of knowledge, we’re involved in action. And in every action we’re involved in choice. And in every choice we’re involved in a kind of loss, the loss of what we didn’t do. We find this in the simplest situations. . . . Meaning is always obtained at the cost of leaving things out. . . . In practical terms this means, of course, that our knowledge is always finite and never all encompassing. . . . This makes the world of ours an open world, a world without end. ”
   

• Nuclear weapons are a great anomaly. spending so much money on something you will never use.

• WHEN YOU GET TO THE END OF ALL LIGHT YOU KNOW, AND; ITS TIME TO STEP INTO DARKNESS OF THE UNKNOWN, FAITH IS KNOWING, THAT, ONE OF TWO THINGS SHALL HAPPEN; EITHER, YOU'LL BE GIVEN SOMETHING SOLID TO STAND ON; OR, "YOU WILL BE TAUGHT HOW TO FLY
   

  Edward Teller This quote provided to us by Scott Fisher of Tennessee

• Having invented a new Holocaust
  And been the first with it to win a war,
  How they make haste to cry with fingers crossed,
  King's X--no fair to use it any more!
   

  Robert Frost This quote provided to us by Daniel Osborn of Colorado

• "To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, by a few explosions seemed, after all our perils and toils, a miracle of deliverance."

  Winston Churchill This quote provided to us by Michael White of Virginia

• "Just at that instant there rose as if from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds...  Then out of the great silence came a mighty thunder... The first cry of a new born world."

• "I know not what World War III will be fought with, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones"

• "During the years of the Manhattan Project, I was told only one, single secret by my husband.  That there were no metallurgists at the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab)."  

• "The neutron had been discovered only seven years earlier.  Then, our model of the nucleus had changed to the liquid drop.  And now fission.  What an exciting specialty I'd chosen; truly the cutting edge.  What great fortune to be in a field with so much work to be done."  

• "The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing should not give us [scientists] the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used."   

• "If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I would never have lifted a finger."

  Albert Einstein; 1946

• "Having found the bomb we have used it.  We used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretext of obeying international laws of warfare.  We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans."

• "The world's greatest achievements often happen on the edge of chaos" - Unknown

• "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be the splendor of the Mighty One----"

• "Talk softly please.  I have been engaged in experiments which suggest that the atom can be artificially disintegrated.  If it is true, it is of far greater importance than a war"

• "It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them."

• ...the people themselves have seen with their own eyes the steadily mounting power and fury of our combined offensive.  You have seen our mighty battleships bombard your shores.  You have seen the thousands of war planes day after day darken your skies.  Japan must make a choice, upon the wisdom of which her whole future will depend.  In light of the alternatives presented in the joint proclamation, this choice should not be difficult.  One alternative is prompt and utter destruction.  If the Japanese people are forced by their self-willed militaristic leaders to choose the alternative of ruin, centuries of sweat and toil will be brought to naught in a cataclysmic end of a very tragic war.  The other alternative is the end of the war.  One simple decision will allow tranquility again to return to the city and the countryside.  The guns will cease their fire, the bombs will no longer drop from the skies, your sons and brothers will no longer face agonizing and useless death on the battlefields.  The homeland of Japan will be saved to continue a sovereign existence under a peacefully inclined and responsible government."

• "We have too many men of science, too few men of God.  We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon of the Mount...The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.  Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.  We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living..."

• "Now we are all sons of bitches!" 

• "We (the military leaders at Los Alamos) came up through kindergarten with them (the scientists).  While they could put elaborate equations on the board, which we might not be able to follow in their entirety, when it came to what was so and what was probably so, we knew just about as much as they did.  So when I say that we were responsible for the scientific decisions, I am not saying that we were extremely able nuclear physicists, because actually we were not.  We were what might be termed "thoroughly" practical nuclear physicists."

• "I must confess, however, that between 1943 and 1945 General Groves could have won almost any unpopularity contest in which the scientific community at Los Alamos voted"

• Sometime in 1943, General Groves, while visiting the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory which was at work separating U235 by electromagnetic means, attempted to spur Ernest O. Lawrence (the director of the lab) on by saying to him, "You know, Doctor Lawrence, your reputation is at stake here".  Later that evening over cocktails, Lawrence (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939) turned and said to Groves, "You know, General, my reputation has been made; it is your reputation that is at stake here."  Groves did not respond.

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