Quotes about bombing (674 quotes, page 4)

“I explain herein why I bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I explain this not for publicity, nor seeking to win an argument of right or wrong. I explain so that the record is clear as to my thinking and motivations in bombing a government installation.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

2000s, Why I Bombed the Murrah Federal Building (2001)

Motivation , Thinking

“If in the past, you didnt cry out when thousands of protestors were killed and injured by Turkey, Egypt and Libya, when more victims than ever were hanged by Iran, women and children in Afghanistan were bombed, whole communities were massacred in South Sudan, 1800 Palestinians were starved and murdered by Assad in Syria, hundreds in Pakistan were killed by jihadist terrorist attacks, 10,000 Iraqis were killed by terrorists, villagers were slaughtered in Nigeria, but you ONLY cry out for Gaza, then you are NOT Pro- Human Rights, you are only Anti-Israel.”

Hillel Neuer Canadian activist

Test yourself: Are you pro human rights, or just anti-Israel? http://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/2014/07/16/test-yourself-are-you-pro-human-rights-or-just-anti-israel/ July 16, 2014

Women , Children , Communication , Past

“I have nothing but scorn for the notion of an Islamic bomb. There is no such thing as an Islamic bomb or a Christian bomb. Any such weapon is a means of terrorizing humanity, and we are against the manufacture and acquisition of nuclear weapons. This is in line with our definition of—and opposition to—terrorism.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Time (8 June 1981) " An Interview with Gaddafi http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922551-2,00.html"
Interviews

“The bomb will not start a chain-reaction in the water converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy, as one of my critics labeled me, exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim.”

William H. P. Blandy (1890–1954) American admiral

As Vice Admiral, Commander Joint Task Force One in Operation Crossroads
Quoted in Gerard J. De Groot, The Bomb: A Life p. 119.

Water , Personality , Sea

“But it was drama, high drama: fires at night, the fires that burned people's houses away; bombs fell and left exotically shaped fragments in the form of shrapnel. And we collected it and traded it. As long as we were not hurt -- and I wasn't -- life seemed wonderful.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

Describing The Blitz

Life , People , Hurt , Housing

“Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

God , War , Secret , World

“Socialism is not a bomb thrown at the natural institution of society, but a well-considered medicine for a diseased community.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"A Training in Trucelence", in The Clarion, (14 February 1913), re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 157.

Disease , Communication , Nature

“…the argument is that by bombing at a time when most of the atrocities were attributed to the KLA guerrillas, with the anticipation that the bombing would lead to far worse atrocities, NATO was preventing atrocities. The fact that this is the strongest argument that can be contrived by serious analysts, and I stress serious because there's plenty of nonsense, that tells us a good deal about the decision to bomb, particularly when we recall that there apparently were diplomatic options.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2005, Illegal but Legitimate: A Dubious Doctrine for the Times, 2004

Decision , Time

“Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.202

Hostility , Age , Imagination , Parting

“Not so long ago it was possible to take some little comfort from the idea that the clash, if it came, could perhaps be settled by what were called "conventional weapons "-bombs, tanks, cannon and men. Today that little grain of comfort is denied us for it has been made clear that the weapons of ultimate horror will certainly be used, and the military planning of nations is on that basis. The unconventional has become the conventional, and who knows what other examples of misguided and diabolical scientific skill have been discovered as a plague on humanity.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Men , Idea

“We in the Western world have grown to understand matter as imprisoned light, and light as liberated matter, yet this has had no influence on our spiritual thought. In practical terms it only led to the creation of the atom bomb.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Sushama Londhe A Tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and Wisdom Spanning Continents and Time about India and Her Culture http://books.google.co.in/books?id=G3AMAQAAMAAJ, Pragun Publications, 2008, p. 341

World , Understanding , Light

“Those terrorists will carry their determination to disrupt society to any lengths. Once again we have a hunger strike at the Maze Prison in the quest for what they call political status. There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in Belfast (5 March 1981) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104589
First term as Prime Minister

Hunger

“It was the morning of April 20, 1999, and it was pretty much like any other morning in America. The Farmer did his chores. The milkman made his deliveries. The President bombed another country whose name we couldn't pronounce. Out in Fargo, North Dakota, Cary McWilliams went on his morning walk. Back in Michigan, Mrs Hughes welcomed her students for another day of school. And out in a little town in Colorado, two boys went bowling at 6 in the morning. Yes, it was a typical day in the United States of America.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

Bowling for Columbine (2002) [released 11 October 2002]
2002

School , Boy , Country

“I had just seen the two most horrible things. The first was the smile. They say that when the bomb went off at Hiroshima, some people's shadows were baked onto walls by it. I think that smile got baked on the surface of my brain in much the same way. I don't want to talk about that smile.”

Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author

God Is An Iron (1977)

People , Smile , Way , Thinking

“Although Bertrand Russell suffered unpopularity in some quarters for his role as a political dissenter, he enjoyed that role immensely. There was more than a touch of exhibitionism in the riskless sit-downs of his last years when he made well-publicized gestures to 'Ban the Bomb' that were as futile as they were ill-advised. I once wondered aloud to him whether his temperamental bias toward nonconformity and dissent was an expression not so much of intellectual courage as of the aristocrat's disdain of the commoner and his desire to épater le bourgeois. He replied with disarming frankness: 'Hook, I think you have something there…”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

Out of Step (1985)

Courage , Thinking , Suffering

“If a certain country conducts uranium-related activities in a certain plant, the bombing of that plant is forbidden. If such a disaster occurs, America would not be able to show its face for all eternity.”

Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh (1949) politician

UCF and Natanz Facilities Are Built in Tunnels Deep Underground in a Mountain; Bombing Would Not Cause Radioactive Contamination http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1051(February 2006)

Country

“It can be argued that the lack of accountability about Iraq led Cameron on to committing many of the same blunders on a smaller scale in Libya in 2010. In Libya the UK spent thirteen times as much bombing the country as reconstructing it and the human chaos and bloody carnage of a failed state now moves like the tide across the Mediterranean.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Time , Country

“Today, with the weapons of mass destruction at man’s disposal, the human race itself is in imminent danger of being destroyed. It is a far cry from vegetarianism to atomic or hydrogen bomb, but if you look at it, there is no escape from vegetarianism ultimately if we want to escape from the hydrogen bomb. Any integrated view of life as a whole will reveal to us the connection between the individual’s food and his behaviour towards others, and through a process of ratiocination which is not fantastic, we cannot but arrive at the conclusion that the only means of escaping the hydrogen bomb is to escape the mentality which has produced it, and the only way to escape that mentality is to cultivate respect for all life, life in all forms, under all conditions. It is only another name for vegetarianism.”

Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) Indian political leader

"Spiritualism, Morality and Eating Habits" (Inaugural speech at the International Vegetarian Congress at Bombay on November 9, 1957), in Speeches Of Dr. Rajendra Prasad, President Of India, 1957-58, p. 96 https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.100670/2015.100670.Speeches-Of-Drrajendra-Prasad-President-Of-India1957-58#page/n105/mode/2up/search/MORALITY+AND+EATING.

Life , Food , Way , Cry

“The wheel of Time wrote the first half of the poetry of mass destruction on the black board of the ashes of a funeral ground by dint of a pair of pens of nuclear bombs.”

Manmohan Acharya (1967–2013) Poet, lyricist

Stanza-10, Verse 6
Song of the Bumblebee (2008)

Time

“People who evacuated their homes to get away from the bombings are beginning to come back. However, many have a strange conception of the meaning of unconditional surrender. Often they find their homes have been occupied by the slave workers who have been forced to withstand the bombing. They come to the military government and ask for authority to evict these people. But they get unsympathetic answers…the forced laborers stay put until they can be sent back to their homes…and the Germans look for billets.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

Broadcast from liberated Hamburg (1945)

People , Home

“The concept of “human existence” suggests an abstract human condition; “class existence” indicts bad conditions. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. … The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 62

Universe

“Furthermore there's the whole argument that the administration made, that so many people were killed by chemical weapons. Their number was around 1,400, the fact of the matter is that over 40,000 other people were killed with bombs and bullets, before those 1,400 people. If 40,000 people were killed, and that didn't provide a moral justification for intervention, what's the moral justification for killing people… when 1,400 die with chemical weapons. I don't get it, in fact, I don't think there's a moral case to be made for intervention.”

John Mearsheimer (1947) American political scientist

John Mearsheimer on America Unhinged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwqqzh59sVo provided by the Center for the National Interest. Here Mearsheimer is speaking about the Syrian conflict and potential United States intervention due to the Assad's regime alleged usage of chemical devices.

People , Thinking

“On the evening of December 8, therefor, after the Japanese had bombed the airfields and destroyed many of General MacArthur's planes, our submarines and motor torpedo boats, which were still in Philippine water, were left with the task of impeding the enemy's advance.”

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

From King's report on the Japanese attack on the Philippines, as quoted in Battle Stations! Your Navy In Action (1946) by Admirals of the U.S. Navy, p. 180

Water

“I think you have to grow up and realise that we're facing religious fanatics who would kill everyone in the world who doesn't do what they say. The more time you give them the more bombs they'll get. Bin Laden is going to try and kill more people. It helps the fanatics.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

Strummer talks war and music (13 November 2001)

People , World , Thinking , Time

“I regret that we did not make a stronger effort to drop the name Republika Srpska. We underestimated the value to Pale of retaining their blood-soaked name. We may also have underestimated the strength of our negotiating hand on that day, when the bombing had resumed. In retrospect, I think we should have pushed Milosevic harder to change the name of the Bosnian Serb entity. Even if the effort failed, as Owen and Hill predicted, it would have been worth trying.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 135

Thinking , Effort , Change

“With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?”

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

Speech on the 25th anniversary of the Moncada Barracks attack (26 July 1978) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1978/esp/f260778e.html

Hunger , World , Support , Nature

“Some day birth control will come off prescription, and they'll need those cute little catchy names like the patent medicines have…some day birth control pills will have names like, "Preg-Not"! Doctors prefer "Embry-No"! Here's one for the ladies, "Nary-A-Carry"! Something lofty and poetic: "Nay Family Way"; something earthhy and crude: "Mom Bomb"; something for the youngsters, "Junior Miss"; here's a real man's product, "Inconceivable"! "Mommy-Not", "Fetus Fail", "Kiddie Kill", "Papa Stopper", "Womb Broom", "Humpty Dumpty"… I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a birth control pill that doesn't work all the time; they'd call it "Baby Maybe!"”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

FM & AM (1972)

Family , Way , Moms , Birth

“It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 68

Success

“Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature)… said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched… said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U. S. S. R… professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you"… used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars… used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war… allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling.".. sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck… then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too… then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.) One could go on… This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2004

Death , War , People , World

“We scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

note (c. 1945), quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick, p. 204

Men , Thinking

“Jihad should be waged in places where there is war. Bombings in places where there is no war is not a good thing.”

Abu Bakar Bashir (1938) Indoneisan Islamist

Leader of Indonesian Jama'a Islamiyya Abu Bakr Al-Ba'shir: I Support Bombings in America, But Not in the Muslim World, MEMRI, October 26, 2007 http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1598.htm,

War

“You go back and you say, hey, guess what, the economy just crashed, I'm going to give you back half. I like debt for me, I don't like debt for the country. I like debt for my company, but I don't like debt for the country. For the country we have $19 trillion in debt, it's going to be very soon $21 trillion, not billion, $21 trillion in debt. And I will tell you we are sitting on a time bomb and Hillary Clinton doesn't have a clue. And President Obama has pretty much doubled the debt since he's been in office and somebody's going to pay a big price. We have to start chopping that debt down. … I wouldn't renegotiate the debt.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, June
Source: In an interview with CBS This Morning Norah O'Donnell http://www.dailywire.com/news/6824/trump-yeah-so-ill-declare-america-bankrupt-james-barrett (June 22, 2016)

Time , Country

“Turkey must show its teeth to Armenia. What harm would it do if a few bombs were dropped on the Armenian side by Turkish troops holding maneuvers on the border?”

Turgut Özal (1927–1993) Turkish politician

The New York Times, (April 18, 1993) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5DB1630F93BA25757C0A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
Said when discussing the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“We're so conditioned as a people to think that a military campaign has to be cruise missiles and television images of airplanes dropping bombs, and that's just false. This is a totally different war. We need a new vocabulary. We need to get rid of old think and start thinking about this thing the way it really is.”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

on CBS' Evening News, October 9, 2001 http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2051
2000s

War , People , Way , Thinking

“"So?" "So- remember? His orders were not to sell them for ten school days. Okay. So the ten days came and went and he's still saying no." "So what?" This is what infuriated Obie- the way Archie tried so hard not to be impressed, to always play it cool. You could tell him that The Bomb was going to be dropped and he'd probably say "So what?" It got under Obie's skin, mostly because he suspected that it was an act, that Archie wasn't as cool as he pretended to be. And Obie was awaiting his chance to find out.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 146

School , Way , Chance

“I want to tell you how I got to be a statistician. I was, of course, born in England and in 1939… when war broke out in September of that year, although I was close to getting a degree in Chemistry, I abandoned that and joined the Army. They put me in the Engineers (and when I see a bridge I still catch myself calculating where I would put the charges to blow it up).
Before I could actually do any of that I was moved to a highly secret experimental station in the south of England. At the time they were bombing London every night and our job was to help to find out what to do if, one night, they used poisonous gas.
Some of England's best scientists were there. There were a lot of experiments with small animals, I was a lab assistant making biochemical determinations, my boss was a professor of physiology dressed up as a colonel, and I was dressed up as a staff sergeant.
The results I was getting were very variable and I told my colonel that what we really needed was a statistician.
He said "we can't get one, what do you know about it?"”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

I said "Nothing, I once tried to read a book about it by someone called R. A. Fisher but I didn't understand it". He said "You've read the book so you better do it", so I said, "Yes sir"
An Accidental Statistician, 2010

War , Secret , Books , Understanding

“Knowledge of these multiple and ever-more aggressive raids across the country constituted an identifiable pattern of conduct within and by the federal government and amongst its various agencies. For all intents and purposes, federal agents had become 'soldiers' using military training, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization, and mindset and they were escalating their behavior. Therefore, this bombing was also meant as a pre-emptive or pro-active strike against these forces and their command and control centers within the federal building. When an aggressor force continually launches attacks from a particular base of operation, it is sound military strategy to take the fight to the enemy.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

2000s, Why I Bombed the Murrah Federal Building (2001)

Behavior , Knowledge , Fight , Training

“…there is a virtue attached to intelligence, but lets suppose that we are all intelligent enough to know that intelligence is not a virtue; that the people who made the atom bomb were very intelligent, and that really virtue resides in how we conduct ourselves…”

Zia Haider Rahman British novelist

"Zia Haider Rahman's In The Light of What We Know" Books& Arts in ABC http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/zia-haider-rahman/6517150?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter June 3, 2015. Retrieved on 2015-06-03.

People , Intelligence

“The worst thing to happen to the Jews since Mein Kampf…I can't look at it. It's so horrible. The Israelis that helped make this film were crooks. They never gave us the negative back, they never gave us statements — not that the film was worth anything…The lesson for Big Gus for young people is: Don't listen to anybody. We got lots of advice on that film from older, more experienced people. But the film stunk; it's a disgrace. What you saw was made from a half-inch video that somebody from Israel brought to us…The movie opened in Tel Aviv, but it opened the week of the Seven-Day War. So bombs were raining down outside, but we had a bomb inside the movie theater.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

Village Voice http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-01-15/film/troma-lloyd-kaufman-interview/ January 15, 2014
2014

War , People , Help

“It may be inappropriate to put it in this way, but the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, God's gifts. Now we can end the war without making it clear that we have to end the war because of the domestic situation. I have long been advocating the conclusion [of the war], not because I am afraid of the enemy's attacks or because of the atomic bombs or the Soviet participation in the war; The most important reason is my concern over the domestic situation.”

Mitsumasa Yonai (1880–1948) Prime Minister of Japan

Quoted in "A-bombs were 'God's gifts' to Japanese regime", Taipei Times (August 7, 2005).

God , War , Way , Sense

“Science wants the fruits of science, and it does not tolerate much doubt about the goodness of those fruits. … Scientists had a bad conscience about making the atom bomb, it’s fair to say, but their doubts were not prompted, still less endorsed by their science.”

Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Science

“I hope these babies have a world to live in. I hope they have a place to go, a land to walk on. I remember when I was ten years old, in Washington, D. C., and I lived with fear of the atom bomb that would keep me awake nights and make me wake up screaming. I used to babysit for my younger brother and sister and I'd be terrified if I heard a siren, a police car, or an ambulance. I'd say, "My God, what if this is it! How do I protect them?" We used to have duck-and-cover exercises in school, where they'd ring a bell at any time of the day, sometimes five or six times a day, and we'd crawl under our desks and put our hands like this to protect the back of our necks from the bomb. We all carried that with us.”

Cass Elliot (1941–1974) American singer

Rolling Stone interview (1968)

God , World , Fear , School

“In the last fifteen days of the war, my Fifth and Seventh Air Forces flew 6,732 sorties against Kyushu alone. Thus, with a deafening roar of blasting bombs, Kenney's Far East air forces culminated their blows against Japan. During the last seven and a half months of the war, their planes destroyed 2,846,932 tons of shipping and 1,375 enemy aircraft, dropped 100,000 tons of bombs, and flew over 150,00 sorties.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 265

War

“The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.”

Harold Innis (1894–1952) Canadian professor of political economy

Industrialism and Cultural Values p. 139.
The Bias of Communication (1951)

Age

“Is it possible that he has already abandoned all hope of getting re-elected? Or does he plan to cancel the Election altogether by declaring a national military emergency with terrorists closing in from all sides, leaving him with no choice but to launch a huge bomb immediately?... Desperate men do desperate things, and stupid men do stupid things. We are in for a desperately stupid summer.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"Bush's Disturbing Sleeping Disorder" (18 February 2004)
2000s

Men , Stupidity , Hope , Summer

“I never hugged him, I bombed him.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Referring to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, specifically to pictures of Tony Blair embracing him
Related by Conor Burns MP at Young Britons' Foundation Reception, via <i>The Telegraph</i>, 13th March 2011, Richard Eden http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8378222/Libya-Margaret-Thatcher-gives-Colonel-Gaddafis-Labour-friends-a-history-lesson.html
Post-Prime Ministerial

“A Persian Cat! Not an Iranian cat, no: an Iranian cat has a bomb under the body warmer!”

Omid Djalili (1965) Iranian-British stand-up comedian

No Agenda (2007)

Cats

“For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

On the Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)

Men , Hunger , Books , School

“The Armenians had a fair warning of what would happen to them in case they joined our enemies. Three months ago I sent for the Armenian Patriarch and I told him that if the Armenians attempted to start a revolution or to assist the Russians, I would be unable to prevent mischief from happening to them. My warning produced no effect and the Armenians started a revolution and helped the Russians. You know what happened at Van. They obtained control of the city, used bombs against government buildings, and killed a large number of Moslems. We knew that they were planning uprisings in other places. You must understand that we are now fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles and that we are sacrificing thousands of men. While we are engaged in such a struggle as this, we cannot permit people in our own country to attack us in the back. We have got to prevent this no matter what means we have to resort to. It is absolutely true that I am not opposed to the Armenians as a people. I have the greatest admiration for their intelligence and industry, and I should like nothing better than to see them become a real part of our nation. But if they ally themselves with our enemies, as they did in the Van district, they will have to be destroyed. I have taken pains to see that no injustice is done; only recently I gave orders to have three Armenians who had been deported returned to their homes, when I found that they were innocent. Russia, France, Great Britain, and America are doing the Armenians no kindness by sympathizing with and encouraging them. I know what such encouragement means to a people who are inclined to revolution. When our Union and Progress Party attacked Abdul Hamid, we received all our moral encouragement from the outside world. This encouragement was of great help to us and had much to do with our success. It might similarly now help the Armenians and their revolutionary programme. I am sure that if these outside countries did not encourage them, they would give up all their efforts to oppose the present government and become law-abiding citizens. We now have this country in our absolute control and we can easily revenge ourselves on any revolutionists.”

İsmail Enver (1881–1922) Turkish military officer and a leader of the Young Turk revolution

Quoted in "Immigration and Asylum: From 1900 to the Present" - Page 188 - by Matthew J. Gibney, Randall Hansen - Social Science - 2005.

Men , Pain , People , World

“The language is named Spanish, not Castillian! Spanish is the language of everybody. It has become the language of Spain already […] Catalonia was occupied by Felipe IV, by Felipe V (who defeated the Catalans), it was bombed by general Espartero, who was a revolutionary general, and we occupied it in 1939 and we are prepared to take the rifle again. Therefore, you shall guess what to expect. Here I have my rifle to use it again.”

Manuel Fraga Iribarne (1922–2012) Spanish politician

Mor Fraga, 16th January 2012, Crònica.cat, 15th January 2012 http://www.cronica.cat/noticia/Mor_Fraga,
Language

“Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a strange bombed-out look.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

“The management science approach to organizational decision making is the analog to the rational approach by individual managers. Management science came into being during World War II. At that time, mathematical and statistical techniques were applied to urgent, large-scale military problems that were beyond the ability of individual decision makers. Mathematicians, physicists, and operations researchers used systems analysis to develop artillery trajectories, antisubmarine strategies, and bombing strategies such as salvoing (discharging multiple shells simultaneously). Consider the problem of a battleship trying to sink an enemy ship several miles away. The calculation for aiming the battleship's guns should consider distance, wind speed, shell size, speed and direction of both ships, pitch and roll of the firing ship, and curvature of the earth. Methods for performing such calculations using trial and error and intuition are not accurate, take far too long, and may never achieve success.
This is where management science came in. Analysts were able to identify the relevant variables involved in aiming a ship's guns and could model them with the use of mathematical equations. Distance, speed, pitch, roll, shell size, and so on could be calculated and entered into the equations. The answer was immediate, and the guns could begin firing. Factors such as pitch and roll were soon measured mechanically and fed directly into the targeting mechanism. Today, the human element is completely removed from the targeting process. Radar picks up the target, and the entire sequence is computed automatically.”

Richard L. Daft (1964) American sociologist

Source: Organization Theory and Design, 2007-2010, p. 500

War , World , Error , Mathematics

“Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman.
The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Points of Rebellion (1970), p. 32–33
Other speeches and writings

People , Faith , Thinking , Personality

“Nor is the Navy content to rest on its present laurels. Long a leader in invention and research, our Navy is already studying new weapons, new methods- the atomic bomb and guided missiles, for instance. Whatever new weapons, or defenses against new weapons, science can develop, the U. S. Navy intends to incorporate them into itself to make sure that the Navy shall always be strong enough to perform its historic function of defense of our own country and of offense against enemy countries. It is to be hoped that every American will exert his effort and influence to see that goal is achieved- that the U. S. Navy will always remain, as it is today, the world's greatest sea power.”

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

From King's Foreword in Battle Stations! Your Navy In Action (1946) by Admirals of the U.S. Navy, p. 10

World , Hope , Effort , Study

“Once again, the world is faced with a transcendent conflict between those who love life and those who love death both for themselves and their enemies. Which is why we tremble. Upon witnessing the first atomic bomb explode at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited a verse from the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." We tremble because for the first time in history, nihilism will soon be armed with the ultimate weapons of annihilation. For the first time in history, the nihilist will have the means to match his ends. Which is why the war declared upon us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our lives, but in the life of civilization itself.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2000s, 2001, The Enemy is not Islam. It is Nihilism (2001)

Love , Life , Death , War

“Revolution did not necessarily involve sanguinary strife. It was not a cult of bomb and pistol.”

Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) Indian revolutionary

Letter published in The Tribune (25 December 1929), with some reference to lines from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson
Context: Revolution did not necessarily involve sanguinary strife. It was not a cult of bomb and pistol. They may sometimes be mere means for its achievement. No doubt they play a prominent part in some movements, but they do not — for that very reason — become one and the same thing. A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end.
The sense in which the word Revolution is used in that phrase, is the spirit, the longing for a change for the better. The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit. Otherwise degeneration gains the upper hand and the whole humanity is led stray by the reactionary forces. Such a state of affairs leads to stagnation and paralysis in human progress. The spirit of Revolution should always permeate the soul of humanity, so that the reactionary forces may not accumulate to check its eternal onward march. Old order should change, always and ever, yielding place to new, so that one “good” order may not corrupt the world. It is in this sense that we raise the shout “Long Live Revolution.”

“[…] Anyone who might think of attacking them would also probably recognize that they were armed. She smiled slightly; all three of them actually had valid concealed-carry permits for the Belgian FiveseveN specials under their jackets.
Although not for the P90 machine pistols in the attaché cases, and some of the stuff in the vehicle would be right out of it. Semtex, timers, detonators, cans of gasoline and thermite bombs, for example. Even if the invoice reads "Cleaning supplies" back at HQ.”

S.M. Stirling book Conquistador

Conquistador (2003), chapter 1

Smile , Thinking , Reading

“The dropping of the [atomic] bomb on a populated center was another totally superfluous crime. Even if callous arguments for the annihilation of Hiroshima could be made, there was no necessity for the slaughter in Nagasaki, cradle of Japanese Christianity. Within a split second the bomb wiped out one-eighth of Japan’s Catholic Christians. Here the argument resurfaces—Truman wanted to impress the Soviets, just as Churchill had with Dresden. But how could any butcher impress the arch-butcher from the Caucasus? Not even the late Adolf Hitler had succeeded.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 282

“I've never been one for late nights, which is why I have always preferred making films to theatre. A play takes over your life: you start to feel sick at lunchtime and by mid-afternoon you're wishing for a bomb scare so the whole thing will be called off. Of course, if the evening goes well and you get the applause then it's wonderful. We're a strange bunch, we actors.”

Charles Dance

Charles Dance's diary http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/charles-dances-diary-6407964.html (June 3, 2011)

Life , Feeling , Night

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy; and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

From The Twilight Zone episode The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street (March 6, 1960).
The Twilight Zone

Men , Children , Search

“Good morning everyone. This past week we've seen the best and the worst of humanity. The heinous terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, in Iraq and Nigeria. They showed us once again the depths of the terrorist's depravity. And at the same time we saw the world come together in solidarity. Parisians opening their doors to anyone trapped in the street, taxi drivers turning off their meters to get people home safety, people lining up to donate blood. These simple human acts are a powerful reminder that we cannot be broken and in the face of terror we stand as one. In the wake of these terrible events, I understand the anxiety that many Americans feel. I really do. I don't dismiss the fear of a terrorist bomb going off. There's nothing President Obama and I take more seriously though, than keeping the American people safe. In the past few weeks though, we've heard an awful lot of people suggest that the best way to keep America safe is to prevent any Syrian refugee from gaining asylum in the United States. So let's set the record straight how it works for a refugee to get asylum. Refugees face the most rigorous screening of anyone who comes to the United States. First they are finger printed, then they undergo a thorough background check, then they are interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security. And after that the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Defense and the Department of State, they all have to sign off on access. And to address the specific terrorism concerns we are talking about now, we've instituted another layer of checks just for Syrian refugees. There is no possibility of being overwhelmed by a flood of refugees landing on our doorstep tomorrow. Right now, refugees wait 18 to 24 months while the screening process is completed. And unlike in Europe, refugees don't set foot in the United States until they are thoroughly vetted. Let's also remember who the vast majority of these refugees are: women, children, orphans, survivors of torture, people desperately in need medical help. To turn them away and say there is no way you can ever get here would play right into the terrorists' hands. We know what ISIL - we know what they hope to accomplish. They flat-out told us. Earlier this year, the top ISIL leader al-Baghdadi revealed the true goal of their attacks. Here's what he said: "Compel the crusaders to actively destroy the gray zone themselves. Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one and two choices. Either apostatize or emigrate to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution." So it's clear. It's clear what ISIL wants. They want to manufacture a clash between civilizations. They want frightened people to think in terms of "us versus them."They want us to turn our backs on Muslims victimized by terrorism. But this gang of thugs peddling a warped ideology, they will never prevail. The world is united in our resolve to end their evil. And the only thing ISIL can do is spread terror in hopes that we will in turn, turn on ourselves. We will betray our ideals and take actions, actions motivated by fear that will drive more recruits into the arms of ISIL. That's how they win. We win by prioritizing our security as we've been doing. Refusing to compromise our fundamental American values: freedom, openness, tolerance. That's who we are. That's how we win. May God continue to bless the United States of America and God bless our troops.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Weekly presidential address http://www.c-span.org/video/?401096-1/weekly-presidential-address (21 November 2015).
2010s

Women , God , Children , People

“When I think about the violence of my own youth in Birmingham, Alabama, where bombs were planted repeatedly and houses were destroyed and churches were destroyed and lives were destroyed and we have yet to refer to those acts as the acts of terrorists. You know terrorism which is represented as external, as outside, is very much a domestic phenomenon. Terrorism very much shaped the history of the United States of America.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

Youth , History , Thinking , Housing

“The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don’t begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives — and millions may die there.”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

And the solution to the Iran crisis is..., JohannHari.com, January 22, 2006, 2007-01-26 http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=783,

Time

“I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Interview for the French newspaper Le Monde (29 April 1999); this statement is considered the source of the term w:Humanitarian bombing", frequently used about the Kosovo War.

Question

“Bombing IS in Syria and Iraq, while refusing to see the problems at home, will have disastrous consequences.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

"Stop Denying the Obvious: Islam is a Problem" (26 September 2014) http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4733/stop-denying-the-obvious-islam-is-a-problem
2010s

Home , Problem

“Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet. Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe.”

Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) American sociologist

, p. xii
The Ways and Power of Love (1954)

Love , War , Education , School

“You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.”

Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) American science fiction writer and editor

Day Million (p. 441)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Hell , Thinking , Time

“Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Einstein discussing the letter he sent Roosevelt raising the possibility of atomic weapons. from "Atom: Einstein, the Man Who Started It All," Newsweek Magazine (10 March 1947).
1940s

“After the World Trade Center was bombed by Islamic fundamentalists in 1993, the country quickly chalked it up to a zany one-time attack and five minutes later decided we were all safe again. We weren't. We aren't now. They will strike again. Perhaps they will wait another eight years. But perhaps not.
The enemy is in this country right now. And any terrorists who are not already here are free to immigrate.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Future widows of America: Write your congressman" in Jewish World Review (28 September 2001) http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter092801.asp.
2001

World , Time , Waiting , Country

“When we had these African bombings of those embassies, we had an intelligence service in there that helped us. We had law enforcement agencies that helped us. We had access. In Libya, you have a government that does not control most of Libya, or a good portion of Libya. And consequently, the ambassador, the State Department, ourselves -- were pushing to get in there at the earliest possible moment. And that ended up being a couple of weeks down the road. But that does not mean that we have not very thoroughly investigated that and are continuing to investigate it. And I do believe the persons responsible will be brought to justice.”

Robert Mueller (1944) Sixth director of the FBI; American attorney

CNN Interview (2013)

Justice , Law , Intelligence , Help

“When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.”

Hassan Butt (1980) British-Pakistani activist

[Hassan, Butt, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2115891,00.html, My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror, The Observer, 2007-07-01, 2007-07-07]

People , Help , Drawing

““The politics of reality,” Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, “That is a curious phrase for a physicist to use.”
“Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of the world.”
“You put your petty miserable ‘laws’ to protect wealth, your ‘forces’ of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!””

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 203)

World , Law , Reality , Wealth

“We are an enemy of the nuclear threat and we are an enemy of testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. New Zealand did not buy into this fight. France put agents into New Zealand. France put spies into New Zealand. France lets off bombs in the Pacific. France puts its President in the Pacific to crow about it.”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Referring to the Bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.
Source: M. King, Death of the Rainbow Warrior (1986), p. 200.

Fight

“Unless Gingrich and Dole and the Republicans say, ‘Am I inflaming a bunch of nuts?’, you know we're going to have some more events (like the Oklahoma City bombing). I am absolutely certain the harsher rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles … creates a climate of violence in America.”

Carl Rowan (1925–2000) American journalist

April 25, 1995 Washington Post.
Quoington Star article entitled "Has President Nixon Gone Crazy?"

“[T]he escalation of the radicalization of Muslims in Europe, I think, has, in the past 2 or 3 years – and you know the incidents – the Nice truck bombing, the Berlin Christmas Fair bombing, those sorts of incidents, I think, have really worried Europeans.”

Christopher Caldwell (1962) American political writer

Interview with Bill Kristol (March 2017)

Thinking , Past , Christmas

“There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and the British Government was fully equipped and organised for an armed fight. But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the communal madness and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of nonviolent practice was an utter waste of time. We should have from the beginning trained ourselves in the use of arms. But I do not agree that our thirty years' probation in nonviolence has been utterly wasted. It was due to our non-violence, defective though it was, that we were able to bear up under the heaviest repression and the message of independence penetrated every nook and corner of India. But as our non-violence was the nonviolence of the weak, the leaven did not spread. Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Speech (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947), as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958) https://books.google.com/books?id=sswBAAAAMAAJ&q=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&dq=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6ydqTtK7LAhUI4D4KHW3-DwEQ6AEIHTAA by Pyarelal Nayyar, p. 326 http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mahatma-gandhi-volume-ten.pdf
1940s

People , World , Communication , Strong

“I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30th, 1934 to do the duty we were bidden, and stand comrades who had lapsed, up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never [p. 65] speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course and which I am glad to say, is inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never to speak of it. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary. I mean the evacuation out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about - "The Jewish race is being exterminated", says one party member, "that's quite clear, it's in our program - elimination of the Jews, and we're doing it, exterminating them." And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be [p. 66] written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if - with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war - we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-mongers. We would now probably have reached the 1916/17 stage when the Jews were still in the German national body.”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

The Posen speech to SS officers (4 October 1943), original translation from "International Military Trials - Nurnberg Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression Volume IV", US Govt Printing Offc 1946 pp. 563-4.

War , Secret , Way , History

“I see the world for what it is, beyond the white and the black / The way the government downplays historical facts / 'Cuz the United States sponsored the rise of the Third Reich / Just like the CIA trained terrorists to the fight / Build bombs and sneak box cutters onto a flight”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

The Cause of Death
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

World , Way , Fight , Training

“There was such sanity in his voice; a politician’s sanity, as he sold his flock the wisdom of the bomb. This soulless certainty was more chilling than hysteria or malice.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Part Eleven “The Dream Season”, Chapter vi “Death Comes Home”, Section (p. 507)
(1987), BOOK THREE: OUT OF THE EMPTY QUARTER

Wisdom

“We went to see 'Dr No' [first James Bond film, 1962] at Fort-Second Street. It's a fantastic movie, so cool. We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was blood. I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper last week that there are more people throwing them - it's just part of the scene - and hurting people. My show in Paris is to be called 'Death in America.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

I'll show the 'Electric-chair' pictures and the Dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures.
Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

Death , People , Dogs , Cars

“One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven—or even proven at all—to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings—then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 6 (p. 91)

Cars , Fashion , Failure , Nature

“In our United Kingdom, the main terrorist threat has come from the IRA. Their minds twisted by hatred and fanaticism, they have tried to bomb and murder their way to their objective of tearing more than a million citizens out of the United Kingdom. The truth is that the whole IRA campaign is based on crushing democracy and smashing anyone who doesn't agree with them. To all those who have suffered so much at their hands—to the Northern Ireland policemen and prison officers and their families, to the soldiers, the judges, the civil servants and their families—we offer our deepest admiration and thanks for defending democracy and for facing danger while keeping within the rule of law—unlike the terrorist who skulks in the shadows and shoots to kill…we will never give up the search for more effective ways of defeating the IRA. If the IRA think they can weary us or frighten us, they have made a terrible miscalculation. People sometimes say that it is wrong to use the word never in politics, I disagree, some things are of such fundamental importance that no other word is appropriate. So I say once again today that this Government will never surrender to the IRA. Never.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (14 October 1988) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=107352
Third term as Prime Minister

People , Truth , Family , Law

“I have no doubt that if an actual ticking bomb situation were to arise, our law enforcement authorities would torture. The real debate is whether such torture should take place outside of our legal system or within it. The answer to this seems clear: If we are to have torture, it should be authorized by the law.”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

"Is There a Torturous Road to Justice?", The Los Angles Times, 2001-11-08

Law

“Saddam Hussein… I believe is involved with this World Trade Center and Pentagon bombing. I believe that you're going to find out that money from Iraq flowed in and helped this happen.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2001-09-14
[2005-06-10, O'Reilly: "We Do Not Speculate Here", FAIR.org, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2543, 2010-11-19]

Money , World , Help

“Let us turn now to the most elementary principle of just war theory, universality. Those who cannot accept this principle should have the decency to keep silent about matters of right and wrong, or just war. If we can rise to this level, some obvious questions arise: for example, have Cuba and Nicaragua been entitled to set off bombs in Washington, New York, and Miami in self-defense against ongoing terrorist attack? Particularly so when the perpetrators are well known and act with complete impunity, sometimes in brazen defiance of the highest international authorities, so that the cases are far clearer than Afghanistan? If not, why not?”

Noam Chomsky book Hegemony or Survival

Hegemony or Survival, 2003.
Quotes 2000s, Hegemony or Survival (2003)

War , Question , Universe

“Hey folks, tonight I wanna talk about global warming. Now, The World is Hot and Flat Society is growing increasingly hysterical and that indeed is causing me to sweat a little. In the last month or so, I've heard suggestions that those skeptical of Al Gore's spiritual crisis are deniers and one good way to serve the planet would be to have one less kid and I've also read that mankind is 'a virus' and human beings are 'the AIDS of the earth.' Global warming is officially becoming creepy and I can't tell yet if it's facisitc or fetishistic but it's kinda like piercing or tattoos, I don't even wanna get one, because I see how hooked people are and it spooks me. I just find it odd that we've come to a point in history where if I don't concede that if Manhattan will be completely submerged in 2057 I'm thought to be a delusional contrarian by some of my more zealous fellow citizens. I'm sorry Angst Squad, but if we commissioned a public works project (let's call it 'The Manhattan Project') and tried our hardest to submerge Manhattan in the next 50 years, we couldn't pull it off, mainly because it wouldn't be environmentally sound and you guys would hang it up in the permitting process. Simply put, I can't worry about the earth right now because I'm too worried about the world. Why can't I take terrorism as seriously as Al Gore takes global warming? There are times that you think that liberals only fear car bombs if they have leaky exhaust systems. And why am I constantly beaten over the head with 'the delicate balance of nature'? Am I the only one who watches Animal Planet? Every time I turn it on, I see some demented harp seal chucking peguins down his gullet like they were maitre d'Tic-Tacs. To me, nature always appears more unbalanced than Gary Busey with a clogged eustachian tube. Listen, the weather is just like Hilary's explanation for her war vote: we just don't know, do we? We're here to miss our next Tuesday's weather much less the year 2057. Relax, we'll replace oil when we need to. American ingenuity will kick in and the next great fortune will be made. It's not pretty, but it is historically accurate. We need to run out of oil first. That's why I drive an SUV: so we run out of it more quickly. I consider myself at the vanguard of the environmental movement and I think the individuals who insist on driving hybrids are just prolonging our dillemma and I think that's just selfish. Come on, don't you care about our Mother Earth? Don'tcha?”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

6/17 The Half Hour News Hour
The Buck Starts Here

War , People , World , Fear

“Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

Modernity is a blast.
"A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ (2017)

World , Decision

“When I became secretary of state, Iran was weeks away from having enough nuclear material to form a bomb. They had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle under the Bush administration. They had built covert facilities. They had stocked them with centrifuges that were whirling away. And we had sanctioned them. I voted for every sanction against Iran when I was in the Senate, but it wasn't enough. So I spent a year-and-a-half putting together a coalition that included Russia and China to impose the toughest sanctions on Iran.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

“You hear people say that all the time: "You can't put the genie back in the bottle"; "you're asking people to forget." But that's just another attempt to rationalize craziness by calling it human nature. And it's a variant of the old racist intelligence theory: because the Hopi didn't invent backhoes, they must not be curious. Sure, people are naturally curious but about what? Would you or I aspire to create the neutron bomb? Of course not. But the fact that I don't want to create a neutron bomb doesn't mean I'm not curious. Curiosity is not value-free. Certain types of curiosity arise from certain mindsets, and our culture's curiosity follows the logic of alienation not simple wonder, or the desire to learn.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

People , Intelligence , Nature , Learning

“A series of things have come up since then that have made the problem incredibly grimmer…. The ozone hole… acid rain…. Three hundred million people have starved to death since THE POPULATION BOMB was written. The famines weren’t as large as agriculturists thought they would be… due to the spread of… Green Revolution technology into the poor countries…. What makes us nervous right now is that we’re faced with again having to do something desperate to increase our food production greatly…. In 1965 we knew exactly how to do it, the question was could we deploy it fast enough—Today we have nothing left to deploy—that’s very scary…. As a species we’re not able to live on our income; we’re living on our capital, our deep rich agricultural soils are being destroyed, water is being overpumped, and our biodiversity, our life support system—we’re already far beyond what we can support.”

Paul R. Ehrlich (1932) American scientist and environmentalist

KQED Radio City Arts and Lectures, San Francisco 1996

Life , Death , People , Food

“You know, the media and the politicians would have us believe that there's something inherently immoral about terrorism. That is, they would have us believe that it's not immoral for us to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan with cruise missiles, but it is immoral for someone like Bin Laden to blow up a government building in Washington with a truck bomb. It's okay for us to take out an air-raid shelter full of women and children in Baghdad with a smart bomb, but it's cowardly and immoral for an Iraqi or Iranian agent to pop a vial of sarin in a New York subway tunnel. Really, what should we expect? They don't have aircraft carriers and cruise missiles and stealth bombers. So should we expect them to just sit there and take their punishment when we wage war on them? I think that it is the most reasonable thing in the world for them to hit back at us in the only way they can. It actually takes more courage to be a terrorist behind enemy lines than it does to push the firing button for a cruise missile a hundred miles away from your target. And yet we certainly will see Bill Clinton and every other Jew-serving politician in our government on television denouncing as a "cowardly act" the first terrorist bomb which goes off in the United States as a result of a war against Iraq. And don't be surprised when the FBI and the CIA announce that they have studied the evidence carefully and have determined that it was Iranian terrorists who built the bomb, so that the Jews will have an excuse for expanding the war to take out Iran as well as Iraq.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

Why War? (November 21, 1998) http://web.archive.org/web/20070324011124/http://www.natvan.com/pub/1998/112198.txt, American Dissident Voices Broadcast of November 21, 1998 http://archive.org/details/DrWilliamPierceAudioArchive308RadioBroadcasts
1990s, 1990

Women , War , Children , World

“[to guest saying the war is "going to go on for months"] There's no way. There's absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks, try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United States and Britain unleash, it's maybe hours. They're going to fold like that.”

Bill O'Reilly (1949) American political commentator, television host and writer

2003-02-10
[O'Reilly: "We Do Not Speculate Here", FAIR.org, 2005-06-10, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2543, 2010-11-19]

War , Way

“While the most visible military action is in Afghanistan, America is acting elsewhere. We now have troops in the Philippines, helping to train that country's armed forces to go after terrorist cells that have executed an American, and still hold hostages. Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy. Our Navy is patrolling the coast of Africa to block the shipment of weapons and the establishment of terrorist camps in Somalia.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Help , Training , Country

“My own feeling was that witnessing the explosion of an atomic bomb, and having to examine all the dead animals, had a profound effect on my father.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 12
Achieving The Impossible (2010)

Feeling , Animals , Dead

“Anybody help me out here, because I don't remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right? I don't have it in my number… but I think it's over 10,000. My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don't think I'm alone in believing that Israel's force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

As quoted in "Massively inflating toll, Sanders suggests Israel killed ‘over 10,000 innocents’ in Gaza" http://www.timesofisrael.com/massively-inflating-death-toll-sanders-says-israel-killed-over-10000-innocents-in-gaza/ by Eric Cortellessa, The Times of Israel (5 April 2016)
"Sanders' estimate far exceeds even Palestinian sources, which estimate that 1,462 Palestinians were killed out of the 2,251 Gaza War fatalities in 2014. Israeli figures are lower." Ariel Cohen, "Sanders: Israel 'indiscriminately' killed '10,000' Palestinians" http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sanders-israel-indiscriminately-killed-10000-palestinians/article/2587752 Washington Examiner (5 April 2016)
2010s, 2016

People , Understanding , Thinking , Help

“Around the globe, nations are turning these words into action. Members of the United Nations are sharing intelligence with one another, conducting joint operations, and freezing terrorist finances. While terrorists continue to carry out attacks like the terrible bombing in Islamabad last week, our joint actions have spared our citizens from many devastating blows.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

Intelligence

“If you are a boy, they will brainwash you, strap bombs to your body and blow you up. If you are a girl, they will enslave and abuse you.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Message to teenage Britons wanting to join ISIS — "David Cameron tells teenage jihadists they are 'cannon fodder'" by Tim Ross, The Telegraph (19 July 2015) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11748953/David-Cameron-tells-teenage-jihadists-they-are-cannon-fodder.html
2010s, 2015

Girl , Boy

“The GNP by itself is no mark of our national achievement. For it includes smokestacks that pollute, drugs that destroy, and ambulances which clear our highways of human wreckage. It includes a mugger's knife, a rioter's bomb, and Oswald's rifle, but if the GNP tells us all this, there is much that it does not tell us. It says nothing about the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.”

Jerry Springer (1944) American television presenter, former lawyer, politician, news presenter, actor, and musician

from a speech given circa 1970 to citizens in Cincinnati Ohio.
This American Life http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/04/258.html, Ep. 258, 01/30/04, Leaving the Fold; Act One.
PLEASE NOTE that this quote borrows very heavily, in substance and form, from a 1968 speech by Robert F. Kennedy http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/faculty/Michael.Brandl/Main%20Page%20Items/Kennedy%20on%20GNP.htm.

Health , Education , Family , Joy

“The war hung over us like a storm cloud. […] They told us how the animals escaped from the zoo after the bombing raid and rushed about the streets. They fled not from people, but to people, and, let's say, the bear roared and shook its paw, the ostrich waved a burnt wing, and the elephant knelt, lifted its trunk and trumpeted plaintively. But what could people do when the earth was burning beneath them? A coral aspid, a very venomous and beautiful snake, slithered up to the sixth floor and meekly curled up under someone's bed. And in these stories about the ruins of great cities, about streets where African reptiles creep and dying elephants trumpet, there was something from Wells and from the Apocalypse — more generally from legends about the end of the world and the total destruction of humanity.”

Yury Dombrovsky (1909–1978) Soviet writer

Russian text
The Monkey Comes for His Skull (1943)

War , People , World , Beauty

“I don’t believe in western morality, i. e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: "Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)." The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East. First, the Arabs will stop using children as shields. Second, they will stop taking hostages knowing that we will not be intimidated. Third, with their holy sites destroyed, they will stop believing that G-d is on their side. Result: no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war. Zero tolerance for stone throwing, for rockets, for kidnapping will mean that the state has achieved sovereignty. Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention.”

Manis Friedman (1946) American rabbi

Answer for the question "How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?" for the "Moment" magazine. http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2009/2009-06/200906-Ask_Rabbis.html
On the Israeli-Arab conflict

Women , Men , War , Children

Quotes about bombing page 4

Quotes about bombing
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