“We would not have hurt the child, even if she is our natural enemy. Nor would we have hurt you, if it could be helped. Finn was killed by a male cat, and in exchange for that information, we also agreed to try to remove the female cats from your encampment before the true melee begins.” Melee?! Were these ninja birds? Green Berets with feathers?”
―
Rachel Vincent,
Shift
“The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Oppenheimer’s warnings were ignored—and ultimately, he was silenced. Like that rebellious Greek god Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it upon humankind, Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire. But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of its terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountainsOn the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,The good deeds a man has done before defend him.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Oppenheimer decided to import the entire Princeton team of twenty scientists to Los Alamos. This turned out to be a particularly serendipitous decision, as the Princeton group included not only Robert Wilson but a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous twenty-four-year-old physicist named Richard Feynman.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Will there be enough to go around, or must we compete for our kills?""Unfortunately, I suspect there will be plenty, but that really depends on how many of you are willing to come." And that's when I lost track of who was speaking. They called out from everywhere, having apparently forgotten I was even there."All of us!""We will all go...""It's only far...""Someone must stay with the children...""Someone must stay to hunt...""Then we'll draw quills. Feathers into the pile! The twenty drawn will go and fight!""Wait!" I had to shout to be heard. "Don't you want the details?"Kai frowned, one of the few birds paying me any attention. "No. We want the fight, and the feast.""No! I said there will be no feasting! It's a war, not a f***ing dinner banquet!" I threw up my hands in exasperation. Mentioning war to a Flight of thunderbirds was evidently like dangling candy in front of a class full of children! Ruthless, deadly children...” ― Rachel Vincent, Alpha
“He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“One day in class, after a particularly difficult lecture, Oppenheimer quipped, “I can make it clearer; I can’t make it simpler.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“FOR A FEW YEARS after World War II, scientists had been regarded as a new class of intellectuals, members of a public-policy priesthood who might legitimately offer expertise not only as scientists but as public philosophers. With Oppenheimer’s defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues. As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end. Scientists working within the system could not dissent from government policy, as Oppenheimer had done by writing his 1953 Foreign A fairs essay, and still expect to serve on government advisory boards. The trial thus represented a watershed in the relations of the scientist to the government. The narrowest vision of how American scientists should serve their country had triumphed.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Khalid al-Hassan, the PLO’s virtual foreign minister at the time, later explained to the British journalist Alan Hart, “I was opposed to the playing of the terror card. But I have to tell you something else. Those of our Fatah colleagues who did turn to terror were not mindless criminals. They were fiercely dedicated nationalists who were doing their duty as they saw it. I have to say they were wrong, and did so at the time, but I have also to understand them. In their view, and in this they were right, the world was saying to us Palestinians, ‘We don’t give a damn about you, and we won’t care at least until you are a threat to our interests.’ In reply those in Fatah who turned to terror were saying, ‘Okay, world. We’ll play the game by your rules. We’ll make you care!’ ” ― Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames
“Frank Oppenheimer noticed that his brother’s passions were always mercurial. Robert seemed to divide the world into people who were worth his time and those who were not. “For the former group,” Frank said, “it was wonderful. . . . Robert wanted everything and everyone to be special, and his enthusiasms communicated themselves and made these people feel special. . . . Once he had accepted someone as worthy of attention or friendship, he would always be ringing or writing them, doing them small favors, giving them presents. He couldn’t be humdrum. He would even work up those enthusiasms for a brand of cigarettes, even elevating them to something special.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau, copyright 2003 Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press; “Intercultural Communication in Cognitive Values: Americans and Koreans, by Ho-min Sohn, University of Hawaii Press, 1983; The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht (New York: G. P. Putnam’s” ― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
“Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Oppenheimer’s warnings were ignored—and ultimately, he was silenced. Like that rebellious Greek god Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it upon humankind, Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire. But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of its terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountainsOn the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,The good deeds a man has done before defend him.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Oppenheimer decided to import the entire Princeton team of twenty scientists to Los Alamos. This turned out to be a particularly serendipitous decision, as the Princeton group included not only Robert Wilson but a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous twenty-four-year-old physicist named Richard Feynman.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Will there be enough to go around, or must we compete for our kills?""Unfortunately, I suspect there will be plenty, but that really depends on how many of you are willing to come." And that's when I lost track of who was speaking. They called out from everywhere, having apparently forgotten I was even there."All of us!""We will all go...""It's only far...""Someone must stay with the children...""Someone must stay to hunt...""Then we'll draw quills. Feathers into the pile! The twenty drawn will go and fight!""Wait!" I had to shout to be heard. "Don't you want the details?"Kai frowned, one of the few birds paying me any attention. "No. We want the fight, and the feast.""No! I said there will be no feasting! It's a war, not a f***ing dinner banquet!" I threw up my hands in exasperation. Mentioning war to a Flight of thunderbirds was evidently like dangling candy in front of a class full of children! Ruthless, deadly children...” ― Rachel Vincent, Alpha
“He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“One day in class, after a particularly difficult lecture, Oppenheimer quipped, “I can make it clearer; I can’t make it simpler.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“FOR A FEW YEARS after World War II, scientists had been regarded as a new class of intellectuals, members of a public-policy priesthood who might legitimately offer expertise not only as scientists but as public philosophers. With Oppenheimer’s defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues. As the sociologist Daniel Bell later observed, Oppenheimer’s ordeal signified that the postwar “messianic role of the scientists” was now at an end. Scientists working within the system could not dissent from government policy, as Oppenheimer had done by writing his 1953 Foreign A fairs essay, and still expect to serve on government advisory boards. The trial thus represented a watershed in the relations of the scientist to the government. The narrowest vision of how American scientists should serve their country had triumphed.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Khalid al-Hassan, the PLO’s virtual foreign minister at the time, later explained to the British journalist Alan Hart, “I was opposed to the playing of the terror card. But I have to tell you something else. Those of our Fatah colleagues who did turn to terror were not mindless criminals. They were fiercely dedicated nationalists who were doing their duty as they saw it. I have to say they were wrong, and did so at the time, but I have also to understand them. In their view, and in this they were right, the world was saying to us Palestinians, ‘We don’t give a damn about you, and we won’t care at least until you are a threat to our interests.’ In reply those in Fatah who turned to terror were saying, ‘Okay, world. We’ll play the game by your rules. We’ll make you care!’ ” ― Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames
“Frank Oppenheimer noticed that his brother’s passions were always mercurial. Robert seemed to divide the world into people who were worth his time and those who were not. “For the former group,” Frank said, “it was wonderful. . . . Robert wanted everything and everyone to be special, and his enthusiasms communicated themselves and made these people feel special. . . . Once he had accepted someone as worthy of attention or friendship, he would always be ringing or writing them, doing them small favors, giving them presents. He couldn’t be humdrum. He would even work up those enthusiasms for a brand of cigarettes, even elevating them to something special.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
“Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau, copyright 2003 Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press; “Intercultural Communication in Cognitive Values: Americans and Koreans, by Ho-min Sohn, University of Hawaii Press, 1983; The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht (New York: G. P. Putnam’s” ― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
“Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.” ― Kai Bird, American Prometheus
