Quotes about atom (572 quotes, page 6) | Quotes of famous people

“War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

War , Communication

“In all respects Negroes were atomized, neglected and discriminated against. Yet, the worst omission was the absence of institutions to acclimate them to their new environment.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern (1966)
Context: During the past half century Negroes have migrated on a massive scale, transplanting millions from rural communities to crammed urban ghettoes. In their migration, as with all migrants, they carried with them the folkways of the countryside into an inhospitable city slum. The size of family that may have been appropriate and tolerable on a manually cultivated farm was carried over to the jammed streets of the ghetto. In all respects Negroes were atomized, neglected and discriminated against. Yet, the worst omission was the absence of institutions to acclimate them to their new environment. Margaret Sanger, who offered an important institutional remedy, was unfortunately ignored by social and political leaders in this period. In consequence, Negro folkways in family size persisted. The problem was compounded when unrestrained exploitation and discrimination accented the bewilderment of the newcomer, and high rates of illegitimacy and fragile family relationships resulted.

“Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: The art of this poetry of love and hope which marked the mystics, lay of course in the background of shadows which marked the cloister. "Inter Vania nihil vanius est homine." [Among vain things nothing is more vain than man. ] Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God. If ever modern science achieves a definition of Energy, possibly it may borrow the figure:— Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity. Adam's poetry was an expression of the effort to reach absorption through love, not through fear, but to do this thoroughly he had to make real to himself his own nothingness; most of all to annihilate pride, for the loftiest soul can comprehend that an atom — say, of hydrogen,— which is proud of its personality, will never merge in a molecule of water.

God

“Someone helped us a lot with the atomic bomb.”

Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986) Soviet politician and diplomat

Statement about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg having performed espionage for the Soviet Union, as quoted in The FBI-KGB War : A Special Agent's Story (1995), by Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, p. 306
Context: Someone helped us a lot with the atomic bomb. The intelligence (service) played a huge role. These Rosenbergs suffered in America. It is not excluded that they helped us. But we shouldn't really speak about it, because we might receive this kind of help in the future.

Help

“The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Report on the Potsdam Conference (1945)
Context: The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.

World

“Of course, we had no idea whatever that this would one day be applied to make hydrogen bombs. Our curiosity was just curiosity about the structure of the nucleus of the atom, and the discovery of these reactions was purely, as the Americans would put it, coincidental.”

Mark Oliphant (1901–2000) Governor of South Australia (1971-76)

On his research on atomic nuclei with Ernest Rutherford, p. 24
Portraits in Science interviews (1994)
Context: We were able to discover two new kinds of atomic species, one was hydrogen of mass 3, unknown until that time, and the other helium of mass 3, also unknown. … We were able to show that heavy hydrogen nuclei, that is to say the cores of heavy hydrogen atoms, could be made to react with one another to produce a good deal of energy and new kinds of atom. …Of course, we had no idea whatever that this would one day be applied to make hydrogen bombs. Our curiosity was just curiosity about the structure of the nucleus of the atom, and the discovery of these reactions was purely, as the Americans would put it, coincidental.

Idea

“We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)
Context: My personal theology is described in the Gifford lectures that I gave at Aberdeen in Scotland in 1985, published under the title, Infinite In All Directions. Here is a brief summary of my thinking. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence.

God

“The atomic bomb had dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance.”

H. G. Wells book The World Set Free

The World Set Free (1913)
Context: The atomic bomb had dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance. When our minds wandered from the preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the possibility of stopping the use of these frightful explosives before the world was utterly destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that these bombs and the still greater power of destruction of which they were the precursors might quite easily shatter every relationship and institution of mankind... war must end and that the only way to end war was to have but one government for mankind.

“Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw”

Attar of Nishapur book The Conference of the Birds

The Conference of the Birds (1177)
Context: Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide
Return and back into your Sun subside.

Drawing

“No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §1 (p. 52)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
Context: No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field — a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. … We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.

World

“The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”

Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966) United States Navy fleet admiral

Public statement quoted in The New York Times (6 October 1945) and in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1996) by Gar Alperovitz 
Context: The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into war.... The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.

Decision , Parting

“Nay, even suppose when we have suffered fate,
The soul could feel in her divided state,
What's that to us? for we are only we,
While souls and bodies in one frame agree.
Nay, though our atoms should revolve by chance,
And matter leap into the former dance;
Though time our life and motion could restore,
And make our bodies what they were before,
What gain to us would all this bustle bring?
The new-made man would be another thing;
When once an interrupting pause is made,
That individual being is decayed.
We, who are dead and gone, shall bear no part
In all the pleasures, nor shall feel the smart,
Which to that other mortal shall accrue,
Whom of our matter, time shall mould anew.
For backward if you look, on that long space
Of ages past, and view the changing face
Of matter, tossed and variously combined
In sundry shapes, ’tis easy for the mind
From thence t' infer that seeds of things have been
In the same order as they now are seen:
Which yet our dark remembrance cannot trace,
Because a pause of life, a gaping space
Has come betwixt, where memory lies dead,
And all the wandering motions from the sense are fled.”
Et si iam nostro sentit de corpore postquam distractast animi natura animaeque potestas, tamen est ad nos, qui comptu coniugioque corporis atque animae consistimus uniter apti. nec, si materiem nostram collegerit aetas post obitum rursumque redegerit ut sita nunc est, atque iterum nobis fuerint data lumina vitae, quicquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum, interrupta semel cum sit repetentia nostri. et nunc nil ad nos de nobis attinet, ante qui fuimus, [neque] iam de illis nos adficit angor. nam cum respicias inmensi temporis omne praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis, saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse. nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente; inter enim iectast vitai pausa vageque deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Book III, lines 843–860 (tr. John Dryden)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Life , Fate , Pleasure , Age

“The free world must put pressure on Iran. It should no longer give in to the nuclear blackmail of a terrorist regime that is seeking to acquire the [atomic] bomb. The outside world should play the card of Iranians themselves, talking, no longer to the jailers, but to those who are jailed. One should no longer fall into the trap of changing seats for the cards are the same even if different ones are put on the table every now and then. What is necessary is a democratic civil disobedience campaign supported by the international community. From now on, the confrontation is inevitable.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

As quoted by Michel Bole-Richard, The regime is archaic. The country is on the brink of explosion http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=4&page=6, Le Monde, June 18, 2005.
Interviews, 2005

World , Communication , Support , Change

“Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnace within high-mass stars. We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

The Greatest Story Ever Told, Natural History Magazine, March 1998, 2010-12-07 http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/1998/03/01/the-greatest-story-ever-told,
2000s

Star , Universe , Parting

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

God , Pain , War , People

“The real danger confronting civilization today is that atomic bomb which lies in the hearts and souls of men, capable of exploding into the vilest of hate and into the most damaging selfishness—that's the atomic bomb that we've got to fear today. Problem is with the men. Within the heart and the souls of men. That is the real basis of our problem.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Men , Hate , Fear , Soul

“One has to look out for engineers-they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.”

Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) novelist, playwright and filmmaker from France

“We catch a glimpse of the great river of science which never ceases to flow in India. For India has carried and scattered the data of intellectual progress for the whole world, ever since the pre-Buddhist period when she produced the Sankhya philosophy and the atomic theory.”

Kakuzo Okakura (1862–1913) Japanese scholar, author of The Book of Tea

Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

World , Science

“It was a long way down. Before she had gone very far the curious dizziness she had known before came over her again, a dizziness not entirely induced by the spirals she whirled around, but a deeper, atomic unsteadiness as if not only she but also the substances around her were shifting. There was something queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known. They led into the unknown and the dark, but it seemed to her obscurely that they led into deeper darkness and mystery than the merely physical, as if, though she could not put it clearly even into thoughts, the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground—perhaps through time, too.”

C. L. Moore (1911–1987) American author

Black God's Kiss (1934); pp. 10-11
Short fiction, Jirel of Joiry (1969)

Way , Time

“Never before in the history of war had there been a more convincing example of the effectiveness of sea power than when a well-armed, highly efficient and undefeated army of over a million men surrendered their homeland unconditionally to the invader without even token resistance. True, the devastation already wrought by past bombings, as well as the terrible demonstration of power by the first atomic bombs, augured nothing less for the Japanese than total extinction; yet without sea power there would have been no possession of Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa from which to launch these bombings. True, the Japanese homeland might have been taken by assault in one final amphibious operation of tremendous magnitude, yet without sea power such an assault could not have been attempted.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

Third Report, p. 195
U.S. Navy at War, 1941-1945: Official Reports to the Secretary of the Navy (1946)

History , War , Past , Sea

“We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance 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. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”

Omar Bradley (1893–1981) United States Army field commander during World War II

Armistice Day speech (11 November 1948), published in Omar Bradley's Collected Writings, Volume 1 (1967)

God , Peace , War , World

“What we may call a blind struggle for betterment in the atoms, becomes in man a self-conscious yearning to grow, to become ever more the divinity within himself, arising in a recognition, now quasi-conscious, that man is a son of the gods. This same urge becomes in the gods a divine knowledge that they are inseparable parts of the universe, and are growing to take a vaster self-conscious part in the universal labor.”

Gottfried de Purucker (1874–1942) Author, Theosophist

Source: The Esoteric Tradition (1935), Chapter 6

God , Knowledge , Self-confidence , Universe

“Eternity stretches in one direction behind and in another direction in front of us, and along and within this eternity numberless multitudes of beings and entities have been evolving — and will evolve — forever. This progressive growth is continuously in action throughout universal nature — nebula or comet, star or planet, atom or electron, all exemplify it on one side of the picture; and, on the other side, gods, cosmic spirits or dhyani-chohans, men, the beasts, and all so-called animate entities.”

Gottfried de Purucker (1874–1942) Author, Theosophist

Source: The Esoteric Tradition (1935), Chapter 6

God , Star , Nature , Animals

“A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the sub-atomic energy which, it is known, exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn to release it and use it for his service. The store is well-nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

The Internal Constitution of Stars (1926)

Drawing , Dreams , Learning , Star

“It is with considerable disappointment you cannot give the explanation of these aircraft as I felt certain they belonged to our government. They have apparently meant no harm, but used as an instrument of destruction in combination with our atomic bomb the effects could destroy life on our planet. ... We have not taken this lightly. It is to us of very serious concern, as we are as interested in the welfare of our country as you are.”

Kenneth Arnold (1915–1984) American aviator and businessman

In a telegram https://rr0.org/time/1/9/4/7/07/12/Arnold_Telegram/index.html to the Commanding General of Wright Field in Ohio, who requested information on his sighting of June 24, 1947.

Disappointment , Life , Country

“It is all so familiar! I suppose that an electron, traveling from one atom to another, also expects to enter a realm of unimaginable novelty. But perhaps the scenery in every part of the universe is roughly similar; since one sees in accordance with who one is rather than with what is there.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Slaves of Time (p. 16)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Universe , Travel , Parting

“Had the early cavemen fought with atomic bombs instead of rocks and cattle bone clubs, the human species would have been extinct eons ago. With great power comes great responsibility.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

“A solid stores energy in the vibrations of the atoms about their equilibrium positions. In the simplest approximation, which Einstein considered, each atom vibrates with the same frequency, ν, in each of three dimensions, so a solid containing N atoms can be thought of as 3N one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillators.”

Jim Peebles (1935) Canadian-American astronomer

[Quantum Mechanics, 1992, Princeton University Press, 11, https://books.google.com/books?id=hTaw4Ht4Vi8C&pg=PA11]

“I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth... but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.”

August Kekulé (1829–1896) German organic chemist

Account of his famous dream of the benzene structure, as quoted in A Life of Magic Chemistry : Autobiographical Reflections of a Nobel Prize Winner (2001) by George A. Olah, p. 54

Time , Night , Understanding , Dreams

“The general notions about human understanding... which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.”

Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics

Quoted from F. Capra, The Tao of Physics.

Understanding , Wisdom , History , Nature

“It is with considerable disappointment you cannot give the explanation of these aircraft as I felt certain they belonged to our government. They have apparently meant no harm, but used as an instrument of destruction in combination with our atomic bomb the effects could destroy life on our planet. … We have not taken this lightly. It is to us of very serious concern, as we are as interested in the welfare of our country as you are.”

Kenneth Arnold (1915–1984) American aviator and businessman

Kenneth Arnold in a telegram https://rr0.org/time/1/9/4/7/07/12/Arnold_Telegram/index.html to the Commanding General of Wright Field in Ohio, who requested information on his sighting of June 24, 1947.

Disappointment , Life , Country

“Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", p. 101
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship

Courage , God , Family , Time

“A natural scientist, examining a single atom, might well be able to asseverate the structure and history of the entire universe!”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Bah!" muttered Hurtiancz. "By the same token, a sensible man need listen to but a single word in order to recognize the whole for egregious nonsense."
"Morreion", Ch. 8
Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

Universe , History , Nature

“It’s the end of the world. I was excited by the whole situation. Well, if everybody is going to die, die hard, shit, but what do I know? Is this an atomic bomb--the end of the world--the end of the millennium? No more fear of being fired--for typos or tardiness--digressions or recessions--and what a way of being fired--bursting into flames--without two weeks notice--and without six months of unemployment--and without sick leave, vacation, or comp time--without a word of what was to come--on a glorious morning--when nature ran indifferent to the course of man--there came a point when that sunny sky turned into a hellhole of a night—with papers, computers, windows, bricks, bodies falling, and people running and screaming…”

Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana

United States of Banana (2011)

Time , Night , Indifference , People

“A Third World War? With an atom bomb? He said it, with an atom bomb. There would be no more world. The world would end. Humanity would no longer exist. I think he has to be put in an asylum. He has to be put in an mental asylum.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Responding to President George W. Bush remarks on Iran, November 21, 2007 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-chavez-bush/chavez-says-bush-belongs-in-asylum-for-ww3-comment-idUSL2062324220071120
2007

World , War , Thinking

“The… earthquakes, hurricanes, floods…are the result of the wrong thoughts and actions of humanity… All atoms in creation are interconnected. There is no separation anywhere. If, as today, we create conditions in which two-thirds of the world’s population must make do with one-fourth of the world’s food, and therefore starve and die in the millions, then catastrophe is inevitable.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Mission Vol. I (1986)

World , Making love , Food

“The problem is the commercialization of all aspects of life. We say it in two words — market forces. Market forces are the excuse for everything that we do. Maitreya says commercialization is more dangerous to the world than an atomic bomb.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Awakening of Humanity (2008)

World , Problem , Life

“Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape—outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy.”

Fredric Brown book The Lights in the Sky Are Stars

Source: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953), Chapter 5 “2001” (pp. 243-244; "ascetism" should be "asceticism")

God , Religion , Drink , Art

“We cannot ignore Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the useless use of nuclear weapons, an absolutely unnecessary use that, in any case, could have been employed against some military facilities that fell, however, on civilian populations of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, to establish the era of the atomic terror in the world.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech (25 November 1994) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1994/esp/f251194e.html

World

“It is necessary that each Marxist-Leninist understand that he can contribute to Marxism-Leninism with an atom of his experience, that every solution he finds, every experience he acquires, in the act of solving a problem, will be one more experience with which he enriches Marxism-Leninism, because Marxism-Leninism has been enriched so much precisely by the experience of millions and millions of Marxist-Leninists acting in the reality of life.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech (20 December 1961) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f201261e.html

Problem , Life , Reality , Understanding

“It is more sinful to conceal the power of the atom than it is to reveal it.”

W. Sterling Cole (1904–1987) American politician

Statement, 9 March 1954. Quoted in Peter G Boyle's The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence 1953-55

“If space in infinite, how about the space inside man? Blake said that eternity opens from the center of an atom. My former terror vanished. Now I saw that I was mistaken in thinking of myself as an object in a dead landscape. I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension.”

Colin Wilson book The Mind Parasites

The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards.
Source: The Mind Parasites (1967), p. 38

Thinking , Dead

“For Men of Letters, as for all other sorts of men. How to regulate that struggle? There is the whole question. To leave it as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one cancelling the other; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal Johnson languishing inactive in garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying broken-hearted as a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation, kindling French Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly enough the worst regulation. The best, alas, is far from us!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

Chance , Question , Heart , Way

“Like the atom bomb, it arose out of equally academic research. Never, gentlemen, underestimate science. I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.”

Arthur C. Clarke book Patent Pending

Patent Pending, p. 500
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)

World , Science , Life , Study

“Perhaps there is some hope that its capacity for death and terror among the defenseless may restrain nations from using the atom bomb against each other, just as in the last war such fears made them avoid employment of the new and deadlier poison gases developed since World War I. However, I am forced to a reluctant conclusion that for the security of my own country which has been the guiding principle in my approach to all problems faced during my career, there is but one course open to us: Until the United Nations, or some world organization, can guarantee- and have the power to enforce that guarantee- that the world will be spared the terrors of atomic warfare, the United States must have more and better atomic bombs than any potential enemy.”

William D. Leahy (1875–1959) United States admiral, ambassador to France, Chief of Staff

Source: I Was There (1950), p. 442

Country , War , Hope , Problem

“We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Imagination , Future , Children , Truth

“Transformation is no longer lightning but electricity. We have captured a force more powerful than the atom, a worthy keeper of all our other powers.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

“In this century we have seen into the heart of the atom. We transformed it—and history—forever. But we have also seen into the heart of the heart.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

Heart , History

“All change is relative. The universe is expanding relatively to our common material standards; our material standards are shrinking relatively to the size of the universe. The theory of the "expanding universe" might also be called the theory of the "shrinking atom."”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

[…] Let us then take the whole universe as our standard of constancy, and adopt the view of a cosmic being whose body is composed of intergalactic spaces and swells as they swell. Or rather we must now say it keeps the same size, for he will not admit that it is he who has changed. Watching us for a few thousand million years, he sees us shrinking; atoms, animals, planets, even the galaxies, all shrink alike; only the intergalactic spaces remain the same. The earth spirals round the sun in an ever‑decreasing orbit. It would be absurd to treat its changing revolution as a constant unit of time. The cosmic being will naturally relate his units of length and time so that the velocity of light remains constant. Our years will then decrease in geometrical progression in the cosmic scale of time. On that scale man's life is becoming briefer; his threescore years and ten are an ever‑decreasing allowance. Owing to the property of geometrical progressions an infinite number of our years will add up to a finite cosmic time; so that what we should call the end of eternity is an ordinary finite date in the cosmic calendar. But on that date the universe has expanded to infinity in our reckoning, and we have shrunk to nothing in the reckoning of the cosmic being.
We walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scenes proceed he notices that the actors are growing smaller and the action quicker. When the last act opens the curtain rises on midget actors rushing through their parts at frantic speed. Smaller and smaller. Faster and faster. One last microscopic blurr of intense agitation. And then nothing.

pp. 90–92 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KHyV4-2EyrUC&pg=PA90
The Expanding Universe (1933)

Universe , Change

“Whether an atom bomb is necessary or not, in this world if you want to be recognized, if you don’t want to be kicked about, you have to be powerful both militarily and economically.”

Sam Manekshaw (1914–2008) First Field marshal of the Indian Army

An Interview With The Field Marshal - Apr 03, 2016, https://swarajyamag.com/from-the-archives/an-interview-with-the-field-marshal

World

“Beauty, which the mirror of creation was beautifying,
with a hundred thousand suns each atom caressing,
despite its great glory was behind the unseen's veil...
it did not know itself until humanity was blossoming.”

Abdul-Qādir Bedil (1644–1720) Persian writer,poet

Bedil: Selected Poems, p. 59
Rubaʿiyat (Quatrains), Stanza

Sun , Beauty

“Atomic war is inevitable. It will destroy half of humanity: it is going to destroy immense human riches. It is very possible. The atomic war is going to provoke a true inferno on Earth. But it will not impede Communism.”

J. Posadas (1912–1981) Argentine Trotskyist (1912-1981)

Attributed
War is Not the End of the World, 1972

War , Communication

“A star fall, a phone call
It joins all
Synchronicity It's so deep, it's so wide
You're inside
Synchronicity
Effect without a cause
Sub-atomic laws, scientific pause
Synchronicity....”

Sting (1951) English musician

"Synchronicity I"
Synchronicity (1983)

Star , Law

“All those countless battles—those endless, and... for the greater part, useless wars, of which... fills up for so many thousand years... are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

The Philosophy of History (1852), Lecture I.

War , Parting

“can you sense twirling atoms
within the quivering air
it is the frequency of care
cast upon the human race
by anonymous surveyors of fate”

Marcin Malek (1975) Polish writer

Source: We'll go asleep: Poems and Ballads, "Here comes time of plague", pg. 62

Sense , Fate

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere."”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
volume I; lecture 3, "The Relation of Physics to Other Sciences"; section 3-4, "Astronomy"; p. 3-6
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Science , Beauty , Star

“The essence of all religions is the recognition of an Authority higher, more comprehensive, more permanent than the human being. The characteristic of Christian teaching, however, is the faith that this Supreme Authority is beneficent as well as powerful. The Christian believes that the Creative Force is a moral force, of more comprehensive morality than the human being that it creates. Under the symbol of a wise and loving parent—the most just, efficient, and attractive image that we know of—we are encouraged to regard this unseen Authority as being in direct relation with every atom of creation, and as desirous of drawing each atom into progressively higher forms of existence.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

[Elizabeth Blackwell, Essays in Medical Sociology, https://books.google.com/books?id=7VlHAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=religions&f=false, 1, 1899, Library Reprints, Incorporated, 978-0-7222-1823-5]
Essays in Medical Sociology (1899)

Drawing , Religion , Faith , Parent

“One thing we must do, most of all, in the future, is to harness the atom for peace and get all of the miners out of the earth.”

Walter Reuther (1907–1970) Labor union leader

Text of interview with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, San Francisco, California, September 20, 1959, as quoted in Walter P Reuther: Selected Papers (1961), by Henry M. Christman, p. 301
1950s, Meeting with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev (1959)

Peace , Future