“Some 500,000 scientists all over the world are devoting their knowledge to the search for weaponry more sophisticated and more deadly.”

—  Javier Pérez de Cuéllar

Stated reinforcing his warning to the United Nations. Cited in the article: Apocalypse—What Is It?, The Watchtower magazine, 2/15, 1986.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Some 500,000 scientists all over the world are devoting their knowledge to the search for weaponry more sophisticated a…" by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar?
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar photo
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar2
5th Secretary-General of the United Nations 1920

Related quotes

“Now one could say, at the risk of some superficiality, that there exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to understand the world, to know nature; the others, far more frequent, wish to explain it. The first are searching for truth, often with knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world.”

Erwin Chargaff (1905–2002) Ukrinian-born biochemist who emigrated to the United States

Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature, Paul & Co Pub Consortium, June, 1978.

“Our methods were becoming more sophisticated, but their yield seemed increasingly commonplace. To stem a descent into triviality, I thought, we needed to search out the causes of the present in the past.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Preface (1982), p. xv.
Europe and the People Without History, 1982

Quentin Crisp photo

“The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 3

John Adams photo

“The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

No. 13
1790s, Discourses on Davila (1790)
Context: The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused. Newspapers, magazines, and circulating libraries have made mankind wiser. Titles and distinctions, ranks and orders, parade and ceremony, are all going out of fashion.
This is roundly and frequently asserted in the streets, and sometimes on theatres of higher rank. Some truth there is in it; and if the opportunity were temperately improved, to the reformation of abuses, the rectification of errors, and the dissipation of pernicious prejudices, a great advantage it might be. But, on the other hand, false inferences may be drawn from it, which may make mankind wish for the age of dragons, giants, and fairies.

Mark Ames photo

“They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Part V: More Rage. More Rage., page 184.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Context: Americans wanted to blame everything but Columbine High for the massacre- they blamed a violent media, Marilyn Manson, Goth culture, the Internet, the Trench Coat Mafia, video games, lax gun control laws, and liberal values. And still skipping over the school, they peered into the opposite direction, blaming the moral and/or mental sickness, or alleged homosexuality, of these two boys, as if they were exceptional freaks in a school of otherwise happy kids. They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.

Daniel Webster photo

“The civilized world seems at last to be proceeding to the conviction of that fundamental and manifest truth, that the powers of government are but a trust, and that they cannot be lawfully exercised but for the good of the community. As knowledge is more and more extended, this conviction becomes more and more general. Knowledge, in truth, is the great sun in the firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Source: Address on Laying the Cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument (1825), p. 74

“Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. […] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Shields of Expectation—and Actuality", p. 425
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

“There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics, 1966, p. 1

Plautus photo

“One eyewitness weighs more than ten hearsays. Seeing is believing, all the world over.”
Pluris est oculatus testis unus, quam auriti decem. Qui audiunt, audita dicunt: qui vident, plane sciunt.

Plautus Truculentus

Truculentus, Act II, sc. 6, line 8.
Truculentus

Robert Wright photo

“That biological evolution has an arrow -- the invention of more structurally and informationally complex forms of life -- and that this arrow points toward meaning, isn't, of course, proof of the existence of God. But it's more suggestive of divinity than an alternative world would: a world in which evolution had no direction, or a world with directional evolution but no consciousness. If more scientists appreciated the weirdness of consciousness -- understood that a world with sentience, hence without meaning, is exactly the world that a modern behavioral scientist should expect to exist -- then reality might inspire more awe than it does.”

Robert Wright (1957) American journalist, born 1957

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000, p. 323.

Related topics