Quotes about explosion (265 quotes, page 2)

“We do not see it because we can not afford to-because the truth is too explosive.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter X : Beyond Youth: Recovery Of Self, p. 287

Truth

“The PLO will now concentrate on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps… We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. Jews will not want to live among Arabs. I have no use for Jews. They are and remain Jews. We now need all the help we can get from you in our battle for a united Palestine under Arab rule.”

Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

In a speech to Arab diplomats in Stockholm; Quoted in the Jerusalem Post (23 February 1996).
1990s

Life , Help

“Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He's normal. He thinks in a sort of common-sense way. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. You know him. He's not exotic. But if there's a fire on the block, he'll run out and help. He'll help direct the rig to the right house and count the kids coming out and say, "Where's Sally?" He's responsible. He's not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world. And then when the fire comes they say, "I warned Joe about that furnace." And, "Does Joe have children?" And "I saw a fire once. It spreads like syrup. No, it spreads like explosive syrup. No, it's formidable and yet fleeting."”

Peggy Noonan (1950) American author and journalist

When the fire comes they talk. Bush ain't that guy. Republicans love the guy who ain't that guy. Americans love the guy who ain't that guy.
"Broken Glass Democrats" in The Wall Street Journal (19 February 2004) http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110004712

Love , Children , World , Way

“The Saudis are brought [to Iraq] in order to carry out bombings. Either they strap on explosives belts and blow up in public places, or else they drive a car, crash into some place, and blow it up.”

Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud (1933–2012) Saudi Arabian former crown prince

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abd Al-Aziz to Saudi Preachers: Saudis Who Go to Iraq Are Used for Suicide Bombings http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1496.htm, video clip http://switch5.castup.net/frames/20041020_MemriTV_Popup/video_480x360.asp?ai=214&ar=1996wmv&ak=null, June 2007

Cars

“Sometimes, a whole bright day passes in explosions of the sun, in accumulations of clouds encircled by redness at their edges, luminously and chromatically, breaking off at every edge. People go about stupefied by the light, their eyes closed, exploding inwardly with rockets, Roman candles and powder-kegs. But later, toward evening, that hurricane fire of light softens. The horizon grows rotund, beautiful, and full of azure, like a glass ball in a garden with its miniature and illuminated panorama of the world, in a happily ordered composition, above which the clouds are arranged, its conclusive toppings, unfolding in a long row like rouleaux of golden medals, or peals of bells combining in rosy litanies.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“Spring” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/spring01.htm
His father, The heavens

People , World , Beauty , Light

“Science Fiction Gods; Do they take much of an interest in us? I doubt it. How much entertainment does an ant's nest provide you with?
'Adepticus Sir, that bunch of Ornithoids on Artoc 4 that you asked me to observe, well they've just trashed their planet.'
'Oh that is a pity Initiatus Jones. What was it this time, ecological screw up or nuclear winter?'
'Worse than that sir, i looks lke they were mucking around with vacuum energy without having first invented the Mobius sphere.'
'Ah yes, the old classic mistake, we loose a few like that.'
'Could we not have tipped them off about it Sir?'
'I'm afraid not Jones, stupidity must remain its own reward, it's regrettable but there you are. Did you salvage anything?'
'They composed some fairly good poetry a couple of centuries ago, and some rather fine cloud sculptures fairly recently, I've logged some records in the archives.'
'Splendid Jones, I'll peruse them this evening. What about those Apes on Sol 3, how are they getting on?'
'Quit a bit of warfare as usual Sir, mostly based on chemical explosives these days, but with the occasional use of plutonium. Many of them have developed a belief in a big bang theory, and they reckon that they have the maths to prove it.'
'Really? Smith in anthropology will probably find that hilarious, I'm sure she would appreciate the data. It was one of her old Stomping grounds you know?'
'No I didnt know that Sir'
'It was a long time ago Jones, and a bit of a fiasco actually, she gave them a piece of her mind about some of their barbaric behavior which then abruptly became worse. Ever since then they have been obsessed with the number plate on her craft, it read 'JHVH'. The department gave her a desk job after that.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: The Apophenion (2008), p. 107-108

God , Stupidity , Behavior , Science

“"We do not encourage initiative," said the factory manager. "What you must do is to learn to work to the safety rules." It was my first day in my first job, as a plant chemist in an explosives factory, located in the English countryside, in July 1941. Happily, he was quite wrong. We were not making some old, tried and tested explosive like nitroglycerine or TNT. It was the first large -scale production of a brand-new chemical, code-named RDX-Research Department eXplosive-developed by a government military research department.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 3.

Learning

“In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 53
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

“Can Intelligence Survive? Looking at this nonclassical evolution of intelligence, one even begins to wonder whether it is such a small Law after all, even from the sun's point of view. Men create lakes and can level mountains; their atomic explosions have already shaken the whole earth's magnetic field; and they send out visible satellites and sensors that now range the solar system. Will the evolution of these powers of go on increasing? Or must it finally run down, was the sun does by the great Second Law?
f we think about this problem in the light of the physical and biological regularities of behavior that we now know, it seems to me that we are led to a further rather surprising conclusion: There is no thermodynamic reason why evolution should ever stop. What evolution leads to is the larger and larger control of environment by the organisms, first by genetic natural selection; then, with the growth of societies and language, by cultural natural selection; and finally by brains. And once we pass a certain threshold of brains and intelligence we begin to know how to insulate ourselves against all sorts of environmental changes.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

Cited in: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Vol. 24, Nr. 8 1968. p. 40
The step to man, 1966

Men , Law , Behavior , Mountain

“What are wanted for the Indian as for the Englishman, the Frenchman, the German, and the Russian, are not Constitutions and Revolutions, nor all sorts of Conferences and Congresses, nor the many ingenious devices for submarine navigation and aerial navigation, nor powerful explosives, nor all sorts of conveniences to add to the enjoyment of the rich, ruling classes; nor new schools and universities with innumerable faculties of science, nor an augmentation of papers and books, nor gramophones and cinematographs, nor those childish and for the most part corrupt stupidities termed art — but one thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions — the truth that for our life one law is valid — the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind. Free your minds from those overgrown, mountainous imbecilities which hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth will emerge from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been smothering it: the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.”

Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu

A Letter to a Hindu (1908)

Love , Life , Truth , Books

“The 'new theory of money and the cycle' which is spoken of in the opening paragraph is of course Hayek's. It was from Hayek that I began - where I got to will be seen. Even at the end, I was minimising my differences from Hayek. I could do so because, as I have elsewhere explained (Economic Perspectives, p. 141n), I still thought, like Pigou and Robertson, and Hayek, but by that time unlike Keynes, that 'we were talking about fluctuations, which, since they did not result in complete collapse or complete explosion, could not have engendered an expectation of going on forever. Booms could then be considered as times of high prices, slumps as times of low prices - with regard to some norm, which throughout the which throughout the fluctuations would not be changed, or not much changed'.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

Source: Money, Interest and Wages, (1982), p. 28; on his "Equilibrium and the Cycle" (1933), an influential work on the topics of intertemporal equilibrium, monetary theory, and trade cycle phenomena.

Money , Change , Time

“There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of diamond. There are atomic nuclei a few miles across which rotate thirty times a second. There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size and atomic composition of bacteria. There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Planetary Exploration (University of Oregon Books, Eugene, Oregon, 1970), page 15

World , Way , Star , Universe

“Those with hard temperaments like to win through struggle; they don't like to be defeated. Inferior hard temperaments are explosive and rash, fierce and violent. Soft temperaments are placid and earnest. Inferior soft temperaments are weak-willed and do not seek a thorough understanding of the skills. Tai chi chuan stresses that hardness and softness complement each other. Training teaches one to be hard, but not excessively so, soft, yet not weak. This is to truly absorb the teachings.Those with soft temperaments easily improve. Those with inferior hard temperaments always mistake slowness and lack of force for sluggishness and weakness. Actually, slowness and forcelessness are fundamental aspects of training. Just as steel is produced by applying heat to iron, tempering it, skills of tai chi chuan are refined gradually over a long time.”

Wu Kung-tsao (1902–1983) Chinese martial artist

Wu Family T'ai Chi Ch'uan (1980)

Understanding , Time , Training

“[Footnote] Livy informs us that Hannibal split the huge Alpine rocks with vinegar to break a path for the elephants. Vinegar was a high explosive in 218 B. C., but not before or since.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Hannibal

“In point of fact, the meteor was something like 30 km when it exploded. It was over north Waterloo and I was north of St Agatha. Two spherical clouds, and two explosions. Unfortunately, I was dealing with a goat that was trying to eat an oil truck's fuel line, goats having this optimistic 'Well, maybe it has become edible since they last time I tried this' worldview, and I missed seeing the explosions.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[cbp39u$gbq$1@panix1.panix.com, 2004]
2000s

Time

“A river is nearly the ultimate symbol for the very essence of change itself. It flows unceasing from one point of being to another, yet continuously occupies the same bed or pathway, and accommodates life’s endings with the same musical grace with which it accommodates life’s beginnings, along with all the muted and explosive moments that surface between the two extremes.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Evolution of a Vision: from Songs of the Angelic Gaze to The River of Winged Dreams, p. 3).
Book Sources, The River of Winged Dreams (2010)

Life , Music , Change

“I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I'd listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Interviewed on Desert Island Discs http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00935b6, first broadcast on 30 October 2005, about his early journalistic career working for The Times and then as Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. In fact, rather than failing to beat another trainee to win a permanent position, he was sacked for falsifying a quotation http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6901161.stm.
2000s, 2005

Sense

“We have reached a level of insanity and delusion, to take a situation from the battlefield, when soldiers are under stress and explosive devices are being thrown at them and attempts are being made to infiltrate, and to take their human response and judge them from the armchairs in Tel Aviv?”

Gilad Erdan (1970) Israeli politician

In response over a video of a shooting by IDF soldiers on prostestors during the 2018 Gaza border protests. (April 10 2018) https://theintercept.com/2018/04/10/gaza-protests-palestine-israel-sniper-video/

“My dear friends! We move everything back to front. What we are doing is wrong and contrary to Nature. Nature moves in other ways. She primarily employs drawing, i. e. sucking energies, since these are indispensable to Nature for the growth and maintenance of life. Nature uses pressure energies and explosive forces only for reducing quality and destruction. Atomic physicists also work upside down. They would be more correct if they started with simple nuclear fusion. They should set about the cold transformation of hydrogen into helium, as Nature has done over the millions of years of Creation. Today's technology has a tiger by the tail, because it splits the heaviest atoms with the greatest development of heat and an enormous expenditure of energy.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Alick Bartholomew: The Schauberger Keys

Life , Way , Nature , Drawing

“I think there are three possible scenarios for the future of Chinese writing, in all of which the government plays a major role. In the first, and at present apparently the least likely scenario, the government abandons its hostility to an expanded role for Pinyin and instead fosters a climate of digraphia and biliteracy in which those who can do so become literate in both characters and Pinyin, and those who cannot are at least literate in Pinyin. This is essentially a reversion to the Latinization movement of the 1930s and 1940s, when Mao Zedong and other high Communist Party officials like Xu Teli, the commissioner of education in Yan'an, lent their prestigious support to the New Writing. Such a change within the governing bureaucracy would in all likelihood result in an explosion of activity that might end in Pinyin ascendancy in use over characters in less than a generation.
In the second scenario the government adopts a policy of benign indifference that involves abandoning its hostility toward Pinyin but without actively supporting it, leaving it up to the rival protagonists of the two systems to contest for supremacy among themselves. This is likely to result in a somewhat longer struggle.
In the third scenario the government continues its present policy of repression, resulting in a much more protracted struggle (though surely not as long as the fascinating parallel struggle between Latin and Italian in Italy, where it took 500 [! ] years after Dante’s start in 1292 for academics, the last holdouts, to finally abandon their long resistance and start using Italian in university lectures).47 In this long struggle, PCs and mobile phones and other innovations still to come will undoubtedly allow more and more advocates of writing reform to escape the stranglehold of officialdom, to the point where (in a century or so?) characters are finally relegated to the status of Latin in the West.
My own view is that this is actually the least likely scenario, the most probable one being that the Chinese pragmatism that has manifested itself so strongly in economics will extend further into writing, and that, perhaps sooner rather than later, given the success of the promotion of Mandarin, some influential Party bureaucrats will finally arrive at the conclusion that the "some day in the future" anticipated by Mao has arrived, and that wholehearted Party support should now be unleashed for his anticipated "basic reform."”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

In any case it is basically all a matter of time. And the decisive factor that will seal the ultimate fate of Chinese characters is the new reality, noted by a perceptive observer, that "the PC is mightier than the Pen."
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006, p. 20-21) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006)

Hostility , Fate , Education , Support

“Our first play in 1981 was Jean Genet’s The Balcony, a prophetic choice, set in Paris in turmoil, just as London was being torched during the Brixton riots, an explosion of racial tensions that had been simmering for some time. I insisted on casting a Caribbean actress to play the lead, Irma the Madam of the Brothel.”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

The South African Interview (August 8, 2011)

Time

“The suicide bomber is an explosion of a contradiction in its paradox, victim and victimizer, yin and yang, two sides of the coin, fire bomb and fire extinguisher, prosecutor and defendant, hangman and hanged.”

Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana

United States of Banana (2011)

Suicide

“Yet even though that picture is dark and darkening, there is one factor which has not yet been injected. I do not know whether it will be tomorrow, or next year, or in five years; but it will come. That factor is firearms and explosives. With communities which are so divided nothing can prevent the injection of explosives which we know perfectly well from experience in other parts of the United Kingdom and the world. At first there will be horrified astonishment, and inquiry as to what we have done wrong that such things should be happening. Then there will be feverish endeavour to find methods to allay the supposed grievances which lie behind the violence. Then follows exploitation by those who use violence of the ascendancy they have thus gained over the majority and over authority. The thing goes forward, acting and reacting, until a position is reached in which—I shall dare say it—compared with those areas, Belfast today will seem an enviable place.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1976/may/24/immigration-and-emigration in the House of Commons (24 May 1976) on the consequences of immigration.
1970s

Lie , World , Communication , Parting

“Present at the lunch with Hitler were Hannekan, Best, Pancke, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and Himmler. Ribbentrop was ill at the time. The lunch took three hours and not because it was an elaborate meal. Hitler explained his plans for Denmark and said it could only be made peaceful through intensive countersabotage. In other words, murder and explosion. It shouldn't be kept at all secret. If a Dane who worked for the Nazis was murdered or a Danish factory working for Germany damaged, on the very same day a Danish factory or prominent person should be murdered, and the papers should carry the story prominently the next day. A prominent Danish scientist was murdered by unknown men, or a factory blown up, the papers should read, with satire and irony. In other words, it was not to be made secret anymore. The Danes were to know.”

Rudolf Mildner (1902) Chief of the Gestapo at Katowice

To Leon Goldensohn (12 February 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Men , Secret , Peace , Time

“… coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. … We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes.”

David Mermin (1935) American physicist

Art , Suffering , Science

“These mighty weapons of explosion and fire are already obsolete, and the improved weapons of today will be dwarfed by the monstrous weapons of tomorrow.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

What Does God Want Us to Do About Russia? (1948)

“The explosion of financial innovation unaccompanied by credible systemic regulation has made the financial system vulnerable. The resulting crisis of confidence threatens global prosperity in the increasingly interdependent world in which we live. There is, therefore, a need for a new international initiative to bring structural reform in the world's financial system with more effective regulation and stronger systems of multilateral consultations and surveillance. This must be designed in as inclusive a manner as possible.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

On the financial crisis of 2007–08, as quoted in "Full text of Manmohan Singh's speech at UN General Assembly" http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/full-text-of-manmohan-singh-s-speech-at-un-general-assembly/article1-340789.aspx, Hindustan Times (27 September 2008)
2006-2010

World , Confidence

“We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time. The explosion is in our population”

José Ángel Gutiérrez (1944) American academic

from videotape referenced in 16 April 2008 Washington Post article Mexican aliens seek to retake ‘stolen’ land https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/apr/16/20060416-122222-1672r/

Age , Time , Baby

“A number of little birds, to the amount, I believe, of twelve or fourteen, being taken from different cages, were placed upon a table in the presence of the spectators; and there they formed themselves into ranks like a company of soldiers: small cones of paper bearing some resemblance to grenadiers caps were put upon their heads, and diminutive imitations of muskets made with wood, secured under their left wings. Thus equipped, they marched to and fro several times; when a single bird was brought forward, supposed to be a deserter, and set between six of the musketeers, three in a row, who conducted him from the top to the bottom of the table, on the middle of which a small brass cannon charged with a little gunpowder had been previously placed, and the deserter was situated in the front part of the cannon; his guards then divided, three retiring on one side, and three on the other, and he was left standing by himself. Another bird was immediately produced; and, a lighted match being put into one of his claws, he hopped boldly on the other to the tail of the cannon, and, applying the match to the priming, discharged the piece without the least appearance of fear or agitation. The moment the explosion took place, the deserter fell down, and lay, apparently motionless, like a dead bird; but, at the command of his tutor he rose again; and the cages being brought, the feathered soldiers were stripped of their ornaments, and returned into them in perfect order.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 250
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Fear , Bird , Light , Appearance

“Emotional Ketchup Burst: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside onself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends -- most of whom thought things were fine.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Definitions

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.”

Viola Spolin (1906–1994) American academic and acting theorist

Improvisation for the Theater 1963), page 4

People , Reality , Freedom , Memory

“I must say that when my Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its work in Birmingham, we encountered numerous Negro church reactions that had to be overcome. Negro ministers were among other Negro leaders who felt they were being pulled into something that they had not helped to organize. This is almost always a problem. Negro community unity was the first requisite if our goals were to be realized. I talked with many groups, including one group of 200 ministers, my theme to them being that a minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration. These ministers finally decided to entrust our movement with their support, and as a result, the role of the Negro church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.
I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!" I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?… time has healed the wounds -- and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting -- ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor's police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor's bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor's men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor's men fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.
Another time I will never forget was one Saturday night, late, when my brother telephoned me in Atlanta from Birmingham -- that city which some call "Bombingham" -- which I had just left. He told me that a bomb had wrecked his home, and that another bomb, positioned to exert its maximum force upon the motel room in which I had been staying, had injured several people. My brother described the terror in the streets as Negroes, furious at the bombings, fought whites. Then, behind his voice, I heard a rising chorus of beautiful singing: "We shall overcome."”

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

Tears came into my eyes that at such a tragic moment, my race still could sing its hope and faith.
Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s

Life , Men , God , People

“The most explosive book of the twentieth century… I'm not kidding, it explodes!!”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Subtitle of his book ...And the truth shall set you free

Books

“The explosion was now officially designated an "Act of God."
But, thought Dirk, what god? And why?
What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15:37 flight to Oslo?”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch.6

God

“We now open our eyes, we see the explosion, we understand the confusion and its causes, we have an exact diagnosis of our disease and we can begin the therapy, not by nervous and uncoordinated magical solutions, but by properly conceiving and trying to build the Entopia we badly need.”

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (1914–1975) Greek architect

Epilogue, p. 308
Building Entopia - 1975

Disease , Understanding

“It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that does not exist between science and other religions.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

World , Religion , Nature , Thinking

“But now we come to the real paradox: that something as explosive as sexual excitement can nevertheless become a matter of habit, But then that applies to all our pleasures. We discover some new product in the supermarket, and become addicted to it. Then our tastebuds become accustomed to its flavour, and or interest fades. In the same way a honeymoon couple may find an excuse to hurry off to the bedroom half a dozen times a day; but after a month or so sex has taken its place among the many routines of their lives. They still enjoy it, but it no longer has quite the same power to excite the imagination. Sex, like every other pleasure, can become mechanical.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Corpse Garden (1998), p. 14

Pleasure , Sex , Way , Imagination

“[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

In the documentary Dreams on Spec (2007)

Women , Business , Parting

“It's a tough war we're in. It's not going to be over right away. There's going to be other wars. I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there will be other wars. And right now - we're gonna have a lot of PTSD to treat, my friends. We're gonna have a lot of combat wounds that have to do with these terrible explosive IEDs that inflict such severe wounds. And my friends, it's gonna be tough, we're gonna have a lot to do.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/27/mccain-warns-there-will_n_83459.html
2000s, 2008

War

“In our theory we have multiple “mini bangs” and these mini bangs are not mysterious like the big bang but they come because of the concentration of what we call negative energy fields. Whenever there are pockets of negative energy, they explode and produce a mini bang. We believe there’s a mini bang producing energy in the centre of quasars, which are very bright star like objects. Gamma ray bursts, which are the explosive creations of gamma rays, are another example of a mini bang. These are actually happening. These can be described by normal physics, but the big bang cannot. The big bang theory does not use any mathematical formulation so they can’t say why the bang occurred.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Jayant Narlikar's Cosmology

Star , Mathematics

“Today, we will hear from federal law enforcement agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who will discuss the problem of ELF and ALF and law enforcement's reaction to their dangerous and destructive tactics. It is these tactics, particularly the widespread use of arson, which makes ELF and ALF the #1 domestic terror concern over the likes of white supremacists, militias, and anti-abortion groups.”

James Inhofe (1934) American politician

Senate Hearing 109-947 before Committee on Environment and Public Works,
on the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front

Alcohol , Law , Problem

“We have defined art as the life form and aesthetic art as the life renewal: the stimulating, animating, agitating, inspiring, inspirational, fermenting, fascinating fanaticising, explosive and outrageous: the renewal of the unknown.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Statement of 1963, as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 52
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Life , Art , Animals

“The one central character of the whole explosive saga to survive, somehow, the traumatic after-events.”

David Frith (1937) cricket writer and historian

Of Bill Voce; The Fast Men (1982)

“In many ways art is similar to religion. Its development consists not in new discoveries which invalidate the old truths (as is obviously the case in science). Its development consists in sudden illuminations, similar to lightning, in explosions, which burst in the sky like fireworks.... this illumination shows with blinding light new perspectives, new truths, which are basically nothing but the organic development, the further organic growth of the earlier wisdom... Was the New Testament possible without the Old? Could our time, that of the threshold of the 'third' revelation, be thinkable without the second?”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Source: 1916 -1920, Autobiography', 1918, p. 33

Wisdom , Truth , Religion , Art

“Back in the mid-1700s, Samuel Johnson observed that there were two kinds of knowledge: that which you know, and that which you know where to get. It was a moment when cheap and abundant print coupled with reliable postal networks triggered an information explosion that dramatically changed the way people thought. […] Now the Internet is changing how we think again. Just as print took over the once-human task of knowing, cyberspace is assuming the task of knowing where to get what we seek. […] Now we revel in search, but most of what we search for isn't worth seeking, as the top search lists on Google, Yahoo and Bing make clear. […] The Internet has changed our thinking, but if it is to be a change for the better, we must add a third kind of knowledge to Johnson's list — the knowledge of what matters.”

Paul Saffo (1954) American writer

"A Third Kind of Knowledge" http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_7.html#saffo, in The Edge Annual Question—2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html, January 2010

People , Way , Search , Knowledge

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion", and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

I. J. Good (1916–2009) British statistician, cryptographer

"Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" http://www.stat.vt.edu/tech_reports/2005/GoodTechReport.pdf, Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965

Intelligence

“We can be as sure as we could probably need be that neither this enormous explosion that set the universe in motion, which is still moving away from us at a great rate, nor this amazingly complex billion year period of evolution, we can be pretty certain it was not designed so that you and I could be meeting in this room. We are not the objects of either of these plans. These plans don’t know we’re here. I’m sorry to say, wouldn’t know or care if we stopped being here. We have to face this alone with the equipment, intellectual and moral, that we’ve been given, or that we've acquired, or that is innate to us.”

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

Authors@Google, August 16, 2007, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0B-X9LJjs.
2000s, 2007

Universe

“Not for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his people — to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements announced under the pompous title of the "Great Society" have dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

People , Truth , Time

“Once helium burning has occurred… the next possible reaction—carbon burning—is not necessarily slow… This reaction involves …a strong as opposed to a weak interaction. …Carbon burning results in magnesium. …Taking a cross section of a highly evolved star would reveal a system of many layers. The inner layers have been subjected to the largest pressures, thereby forced to the highest temperatures, and burned the furthest; the outermost layers, by contrast, have not burned at all. Thus, as we proceed from outside in, there will be an outermost layer with the initial mix of hydrogen and helium, a layer of mostly helium, a layer of carbon, a layer of magnesium, and so on. …So we arrive at the picture of a star, in the latest stages of its evolution… now composed of mostly carbon nuclei and other explosive material.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Star , Strong

“Three technical aspects of thermonuclear weapons have made thermonuclear war a peril to the very existence of humanity. These aspects are: the enormous destructive power of a thermonuclear explosion, the relative cheapness of rocket-thermonuclear weapons, and the practical impossibility of an effective defense against a massive rocket-nuclear attack.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat of Nuclear War

War

“I do not want to heap coals of fire on anyone's head, but I would like to advise those who keep the living thought of the dead hidden away in cardboard boxes, to pass on as quickly as possibly such explosive material, whose only legitimate heir is the whole world, that is to say, my neighbor.”

Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995) French musicologist

The Old Man and His Movements (Times Press, 1964)
Literary works

World , Dead , Box

“The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions.”

Michael Lewis book The Big Short

Source: The Big Short (2010), Chapter Nine, A Death Of Interest, p. 225

Speed

“In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard 'the full sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under the kingdom in Europe to its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris. 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion burst.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Source: The Age of Revolution (1962), Chapter 16, Conclusion: Towards 1848

“Cesalpino, a celebrated botanist, conceived that fossil shells had been left on the land by the sea, and had concreted into stone during the consolidation the soil; and in the following year (1597), Simeone Majoli went still farther, and coinciding for the most part with views of Cesalpino, suggested that the shells and matter of the Veronese, and other districts, might have cast up, upon the land, by volcanic explosions, like those gave rise, in 1538, to Monte Nuovo, near Puzzuoli.- This hint was the first imperfect attempt to connect the position fossil shells with the agency of volcanoes, a system more fully developed by Hooke, [Antonio] Lazzaro Moro, Hutton, and other writers. Two years afterwards, Imperati advocated the animal origin of fossilized shells, yet admitted that stones could vegetate by force of 'an internal principle,' and, as evidence of this, he referred to the teeth of fish, and spines of echini found petrified.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Ref. Ferrante Imperato, Dell'Historia Naturale http://books.google.com/books?id=heGCGe1Rn3YC& (1599)
Chpt.3, p. 30
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Fish , Animals , Parting , Sea

“I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

God , Family , Feeling , Home

“Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of it: that otherwise sane and responsible citizens should devote their professional energies to causing others to make sharp, explosive barking-like exhalations.”

Steve Allen (1921–2000) American comedian, actor, musician and writer

Funny People (1981)

Life , Thinking , Laughter

“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

“[H]umans hate to admit error even as they stand there, black and smoldering, with the stub of a cigarette in one hand, in the middle of a wide crater containing them and the remains of a sign that once read 'DANGER: VOLATILE EXPLOSIVES”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[d8ceo5$gng$1@reader1.panix.com, 2005]
2000s

Hate , Error , Reading

“Transformers is so belabored that it makes Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End seem like a masterpiece of pacing. It makes that "classic" midsummer alien invasion movie, Independence Day, seem like a template for inventive plotting and solid character development. Even by Michael Bay standards, this movie is vapid. Yes, there are plenty of explosions, but those are a dime-a-dozen these days; even Discovery Channel's Mythbusters has them. Transformers isn't clean, big-budget fun; it's clean, big-budget tedium. For Transformers fans, I suppose this is a dream motion picture. For everyone else, it's a nightmare.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=591 of Transformers (2007).
One-and-a-half star reviews

World , Dreams

“In a sense, all of Earth glows in the dark. The energy release from natural radioactivity, the lingering fluorescence of stellar explosions, keeps Earth dynamic. It melts the core and keeps it flowing, and heats the crust and mantle, with consequences ranging from the generation of earth's magnetic field to earthquakes and the motion of continents. By contrast, Luna and Mars, because they are smaller, derive less energy from radioactive decays. Geologically, they are dead.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.11 Explosions and Fluourescence (or, Entropy's Revenge)

Nature , Sense , Dead

“Derangement is the signature expression of the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that first came snarling onto the national stage in response to the partying and protests of the late sixties. While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues — summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art — which it then marries to pro-business economic polices. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements — not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars — that are the movement’s greatest monuments. The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization that are its components. Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don’t deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. It makes possible the police pushers’ fantasies of “globalization” and a free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire plant must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U. S. A.The Great Backlash has made the laissez-faire revival possible, but this does not mean that it speak to us in the manner of the capitalists of old, invoking the divine right of money or demanding that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of being. On the contrary; the backlash imagines itself as a foe of the elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted, as a righteous protest of the people on history’s receiving end. That is champions today control all three branches of government matters not a whit. That is greatest beneficiaries are the wealthiest people on the plant does not give it pause.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Introduction: What's the Matter with America (pp. 5-6).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Money , War , People , World

“The Goldberg Variations have always enjoyed a special status, with pianists regarding them as a touchstone of their technical and interpretative powers. At stake are the ability to light up the work from within, a tightrope walk that at the same time describes a vast circle, starting out and returning to a state of apotheotic stillness, the ability to find one’s bearings within a particular concentration of inner and outer complexity, an inner and outer coherence and homogeneity that are all-embracing, the ability, finally, to produce an explosion of inner cells by reduced means and, hence, a particular sensitivity, sinewy tension, and color. The performer must play a game with particular devices, finding solutions to the problems posed by the work not in octave doublings and other playful expedients but in a tightly structured inner rigor and order. What is demanded is a particular form of internalization, of inner and outer lyricism. It is this that makes the Goldberg Variations so unique - and so demanding.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Color , Game , Problem , Light

“I told my therapist I was having nightmares about nuclear explosions. He said don't worry, it's not the end of the world.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

World

“As a Macedonian [Philip] was looked down upon by the more refined Athenians, but they shared the same Hellenistic culture. How deep this went is evident in aesthetically the least spectacular, but politically the most explosive, of the finds in Vergina. In the Great Tumulus above Philip's tombs, which was raised by the invading Galatians in 274 BC, the archaeologists found fragments of no fewer than seventy-five funeral monuments, or stelai. The names on these were entirely Greek, save two which appeared to be Hellenised versions of Thracian and Phoenician names. The implication is that Philip's Macedonia was thoroughly Hellenised, an outpost of classical Greek culture.”

Robert Fox

The Inner Sea: The Mediterranean and its People, (Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1991) pp. 229-230

Appearance

“Overdrafts on aquifers are one reason some of our geologist colleagues are convinced that water shortages will bring the human population explosion to a halt. There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water.”

Paul R. Ehrlich (1932) American scientist and environmentalist

The Population Explosion (1990)

Water

“Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn’t just consequence?
I think, and I’ve thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, porducing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever.”

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

I Remember a Winter (p. 139)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Thinking , Time

“The usual people tried to claim responsibility.
First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 2

People , Chance

“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

“They say something about being safe in the bunker, and how it's almost fun to hear the explosions when they know the bangs can't hurt them. Suddenly there is the sound of a shot, so loud, so close that we all fall silent. It echoes on through all the rooms. "That was a direct hit," cried Helmut [Goebbels] with no idea how right he is. The Fuhrer is dead now.”

Traudl Junge (1920–2002) secretary to Adolf Hitler

Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End (2011) by Nicholas Best, p. 185.

Idea , Hurt , Dead

“To approach Bach, one has to realize that 100 years after Bach’s death, Bach and his music totally had been forgotten. Even while he was still alive, Bach himself believed in the polyphonic power and the resulting symmetric architectures of well-proportioned music. But this had been an artificial truth - even for him. Other composers, including his sons, already composed in another style, where they found other ideals and brought them to new solutions. The spirit of the time already had changed while Bach was still alive. A hundred years later, it was Mendelssohn who about 1850 discovered Bach anew with the performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Now a new renaissance began, and the world learned to know the greatness of Bach. To become acquainted with Bach, many transcriptions were done. But the endeavors in rediscovering Bach had been - stylistically - in a wrong direction. Among these were the orchestral transcriptions of Leopold Stokowski, and the organ interpretations of the multitalented Albert Schweitzer, who, one has to confess, had a decisive effect on the rediscovery of Bach. All performances had gone in the wrong direction: much too romantic, with a false knowledge of historic style, the wrong sound, the wrong rubato, and so on. The necessity of artists like Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould - again 100 years later - has been understandable: The radicalism of Glenn Gould pointed out the real clarity and the internal explosions of the power-filled polyphony in the best way. This extreme style, called by many of his critics refrigerator interpretations, however really had been necessary to demonstrate the right strength to bring out the architecture in the right manner, which had been lost so much before. I’m convinced that the style Glenn Gould played has been the right answer. But there has been another giant: it was no less than Helmut Walcha who, also beginning in the 1950, started his legendary interpretations for the DG-Archive productions of the complete organ-work cycle on historic organs (Silbermann, Arp Schnitger). Also very classical in strength of speed and architectural proportions, he pointed out the polyphonic structures in an enlightened but moreover especially humanistic way, in a much more smooth and elegant way than Glenn Gould on the piano. Some years later it was Virgil Fox who acquainted the U. S. with tours of the complete Bach cycle, which certainly was effective in its own way, but much more modern than Walcha. The ranges of Bach interpretations had become wide, and there were the defenders of the historical style and those of the much more modern romantic style. Also the performances of the orchestral and cantata Bach had become extreme: on one side, for example, Karl Richter, who used a big and rich-toned orchestra; on the other side Helmut Rilling, whose Bach was much more historically oriented.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Death , Truth , World , Music

“Beginning from today, we shal shift over to the partisan tactic. Three battle companies will move out tonight, with two tasks: reconnaissance and obtaining arms. Do you remember, short-range weapons are of no use to us. We use such weapons only rarely. What we need urgently: grenades, rifles, machine guns and explosives.”

Mordechai Anielewicz (1919–1943) Leader of the Jewish Combat Organization

“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

“In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was "nonlinear, catastrophic structural exasperation," or to put it another way--as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career--the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it was."”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 2

Way , Night

“There isn't any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There's only barren instant replay that shows nothing new. I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even…I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest. What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I'm sure it must be a very sane feeling. That's probably why they scream all the way down.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

Dreams , Way , Feeling , Thinking

“The wealth of the country was robbed and wasted in the interest of imperialism and the foreigner. In fact, everything in this country was exploited for the foreigner. The son of the people was living in miserable conditions. He was humiliated and insulted. Had we been patient for a time, it would have only been for the greatest explosion, as our people exploded with the Army in one day and destroyed the idols who were following the foreigners.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

The historical extempore speech at the Reserve Officers' College (1959)

People , Time , Country , Wealth

“.. the equivalence of sounds, gratings, scratches, explosions, shots, blows, hammering, shouts, resonance, echoes in space; meditation of a cosmic theme, reflection for the contemplation of the earth, of magma, of lava, of ash; battlefield; garden; play-field; destiny of the ephemeral... Far from the cliché people have of artists holding the baggage of necessary originality, personality, style, etc., that calls for an outsider's discussion of the works, for the author there is, foremost, a nucleus of thought that is more anonymous and collective and of which artists are but humble servants. This is surely the zone where wisdom is deposited, the wisdom that one may really find beneath all ideologies and the contingencies of this world. It is the impulse of our life instinct for knowledge, love and freedom that has been kept and fed by the wisdom of all time.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Love , Life , Wisdom , People

“How will you construct the gun that will stand this strain? … you will enter the shell and detonate the explosive and start off at 7 miles a second. That is, you get a blow 50 times as hard as if struck by a Big Bertha shell. Clearly, you are flattened like a pancake. The bump is equal to a fall from a height of many thousands of miles …. This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments …. all these errors could be easily avoided by correlative meetings of groups of different scientists investigating all kinds of cosmic problems. This is the work the Correlative Science Society, established by the Royal Botanic Society, has been attempting to do with most encouraging results.”

A.W. Bickerton (1842–1929) British scientist

From Scholar-Errant: A biography of Professor A.W. Bickerton, by R.M. Burdon, Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1956, quoting an article by Bickerton in the Daily Mail, who was then apparently commenting on a plan by some Russian scientists to be launched to the moon from a large gun, a la Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon:

Error , Idea , Problem , Science

“Laughter is a strange response. I mean, what is it? It's a spasm of some kind! Is that always joy? It's very often discomfort. It's some sort of explosive reaction. It's very complex.”

Madeline Kahn (1942–1999) American actress

1989 interview. Reported in William H. Honan, The New York Times (December 4, 1999) "Madeline Kahn: Funny Actress in 'Blazing Saddles'", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, p. A-11
Attributed

Laughter , Joy

“Government by inquisition has never been good. However, since January 1979, our country has been under the yoke of inquisitorial power. Five centuries after the Spanish Inquisition, Iran is living under the terror of a new Torquemada who is more pitiless and more sinister than its predecessor. In fact the Inquisition tribunals did not sentence men to be executed unless they were known to be heretics. They had the opportunity to recant and to repent; and they would call witnesses, which the Iranian Torquemada does not allow.
The tribunals are said to be Islamic. But the truth cannot be overlooked, and genuine Islamic law insists on the right of an accused man to defend himself. Islam is never served by hatred, vengeance and murder, but by justice, goodness, forgiveness and high moral standards. This explosion of hatred, supposedly "in the name of God", is an insult to God and to our religion. And this insult, I repeat, unfortunately threatens to do great harm to Islam, just as the Inquisition did great harm to Catholicism.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 209
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On Islam and the Islamic Revolution

Men , God , Truth , Religion

“Do you know the Boston Marathon explosion? I did it.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev (1986–2013) Chechen-American perpetrator of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing

To Dun Meng (April 2013), as quoted in "Boston Bombing Day 4: The Firefight: 'I Thought We Were Gonna Die'" http://abcnews.go.com/US/boston-bombing-day-firefight-thought-gonna-die/story?id=38554342 (21 April 2016), by Brian Ross, ABC News

“I grew up with the colors of war -- the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it. I grew up with the sounds of war -- the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens. These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable silence. "War," a friend of mine said, "is not about sound at all. It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity."”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

War , Children , Color , Bird

“And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions—students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame,—might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs.”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

Men , Children , Democracy , Universe

“Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we're supposed to ignore. The gunshots and tires squeeling, sounds wee have to pretend are okay. They don't mean anything. It's just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It's not real. It's just a movie. We're the culture that cried wolf.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 17

People , Wolf

“To return to the question of strategy…The Falkland Islands are unlikely to cause a major explosion.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in the House of Commons (7 July 1981) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1981/jul/07/defence-programme
Post-Prime Ministerial

Question

“Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive. The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to the extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life—the ragged edge of starvation.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Farmer in the Sky

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 18, “Pioneer Party” (p. 196)

Life , Food , Mathematics

“If you're in the mood for something that's completely visceral and mindless (really mindless — the plot is a joke, filled with contrivances and coincidences), this movie will fit the bill. Parts of it are excruciatingly bad, but there are numerous examples of well-directed action that, on balance, compensate for the worst gaffes. This is a poor man's Die Hard. It has the explosions, gunplay, and spectacular stunts, but little of the wit and intelligence. In other words, it's a typical summer action flick.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1556 of Cliffhanger (1993).
Two star reviews

Intelligence , Mood , Summer , Parting

“In the Middle East, the opposition is quite different than the opposition in advanced countries. In our countries, the opposition takes the form of explosions, assassinations, killings.”

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

Video lecture at Columbia University (23 March 2006), quoted in BBC News (23 March 2006) "Gaddafi gives lesson on democracy"
Speeches

Country

“Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.

The most perfect, and the most dangerous, example of this process is the subject miscalled, and deliberately miscalled, 'race'. The people of this country are told that they must feel neither alarm nor objection to a West Indian, African and Asian population which will rise to several millions being introduced into this country. If they do, they are 'prejudiced', 'racialist'... A current situation, and a future prospect, which only a few years ago would have appeared to everyone not merely intolerable but frankly incredible, has to be represented as if welcomed by all rational and right-thinking people. The public are literally made to say that black is white. Newspapers like the Sunday Times denounce it as 'spouting the fantasies of racial purity' to say that a child born of English parents in Peking is not Chinese but English, or that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham is not English but Indian. It is even heresy to assert the plain fact that the English are a white nation. Whether those who take part know it or not, this process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest absurdities is a sinister and deadly weapon. In the end, it renders the majority, who are marked down to be the victims of violence or revolution or tyranny, incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong. The process has already gone perilously far, when political parties at a general election dare not discuss a subject which results from and depends on political action and which for millions of electors transcends all others in importance; or when party leaders can be mesmerised into accepting from the enemy the slogans of 'racialist' and 'unChristian' and applying them to lifelong political colleagues...

In the universities, we are told that education and the discipline ought to be determined by the students, and that the representatives of the students ought effectively to manage the institutions. This is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense which it is already obligatory for academics and journalists, politicians and parties, to accept and mouth upon pain of verbal denunciation and physical duress.

We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the 'developed' countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced 'aid' to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.

Then there is the 'civil rights' nonsense. In Ulster we are told that the deliberate destruction by fire and riot of areas of ordinary property is due to the dissatisfaction over allocation of council houses and opportunities for employment. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that has not prevented the Parliament and government of the United Kingdom from undermining the morale of civil government in Northern Ireland by imputing to it the blame for anarchy and violence.

Most cynically of all, we are told, and told by bishops forsooth, that communist countries are the upholders of human rights and guardians of individual liberty, but that large numbers of people in this country would be outraged by the spectacle of cricket matches being played here against South Africans. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that did not prevent a British Prime Minister and a British Home Secretary from adopting it as acknowledged fact.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The "enemy within" speech during the 1970 general election campaign; speech to the Turves Green Girls School, Northfield, Birmingham (13 June 1970), from Still to Decide (Eliot Right Way Books, 1972), pp. 36-37.
1970s

Pain , People , World , Education