Bernard Lown: Being

Bernard Lown was American cardiologist developer of the DC defibrillator and the cardioverter, as well as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Explore interesting quotes on being.
Bernard Lown: 46   quotes 0   likes

“The reason, the creativeness, and the courage that human beings possess foster an abiding faith that what humanity creates, humanity can and will control.”

Bernard Lown

A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Context: If we are to succeed, this vision must possess millions of people. We must convince each generation that they are but transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity's past nor dim its future. Only life itself can lay claim to sacred continuity. The magnitude of the danger and its imminence must bring the human family together in common pursuit of peace denied throughout the century. On the threshold of a new millennium the achievement of world peace is no longer remote, for it is beckoned by the unleashing of the deepest spiritual forces embedded in humankind when threatened with extinction. The reason, the creativeness, and the courage that human beings possess foster an abiding faith that what humanity creates, humanity can and will control.

Faith , Courage

“We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity that each of us is being continuously targeted for extinction. We protest the ongoing increase in overkill.”

Bernard Lown

Nobel Peace Prize acceptance (1985)
Context: We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity that each of us is being continuously targeted for extinction. We protest the ongoing increase in overkill. We protest the expansion of the arms race to space. We protest the diversion of scarce resources from aching human needs. Dialogue without deeds brings the calamity ever closer, as snail-paced diplomacy is outdistanced by missile-propelled technology. We physicians demand deeds to implement further deeds which will lead to the abolition of all nuclear weaponry.
We recognise that before abolition can become a reality, the nuclear arms race must be halted.

World

“Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem "Darkness":
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless; and the icy Earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought no day,…
All earth was but one thought — and that was Death…”

Bernard Lown

A Prescription for Hope (1985)

Death , World , Dreams , Imagination

“We physicians who shepherd human life from birth to death have a moral imperative to resist with all our being the drift toward the brink.”

Bernard Lown

Nobel Peace Prize acceptance (1985)
Context: We physicians who shepherd human life from birth to death have a moral imperative to resist with all our being the drift toward the brink. The threatened inhabitants on this fragile planet must speak out for those yet unborn, for posterity has no lobby with politicians.

Life , Death , Birth