21 quotes
The imagined enemy is eventually banished from the human family and reduced to an inanimate object whose annihilation loses all moral dimension.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
The reason, the creativeness, and the courage that human beings possess foster an abiding faith that what humanity creates, humanity can and will control.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
We must hold fast to the dream that reason will prevail.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
It is a statistical certainly that hair-trigger readiness cannot endure as a permanent condition.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Paranoid fantasies of a dehumanized adversary cannot withstand the common pursuit of healing and preventing illness.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
For the first time science and medicine can diminish drudgery and pain.
Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
We recognise that before abolition can become a reality, the nuclear arms race must be halted.
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance (1985)
May we learn from barbaric and bloody deeds of the twentieth century and bestow the gift of peace to the next millennium.
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance (1985)
All nations share a linked destiny; nuclear weapons are their shared enemy.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
But the Second World War introduced total war, unprincipled in method, unlimited in violence, and indiscriminate in victims.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Summits like those in Geneva promote hope. But hope without action is hopeless.
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance (1985)
The prolonged agony which left 50 million dead did not provide an enduring basis for an armistice to barbarism.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Every historic period has had its Cassandras. Our era is the first in which prophecies of doom stem from objective scientific analyses.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
The advent of the nuclear age posed an unprecedented question: not whether war would exact yet more lives but whether war would preclude human existence altogether.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
As no national interest would justify inflicting genocide on the victim and suicide on the aggressor, a prevalent misconception is that nuclear war will never be fought.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
We physicians who shepherd human life from birth to death have a moral imperative to resist with all our being the drift toward the brink. The threatened inhabitants on this fragile planet must speak out for those yet unborn, for posterity has no lobby with politicians.
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance (1985)
Throughout human history, when confronted with what was deemed a deadly enemy, the fixed human response has been to gather more rocks, muskets, cannons, and now nuclear bombs.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
We must convince each generation that they are but transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity's past nor dim its future.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity that each of us is being continuously targeted for extinction. We protest the ongoing increase in overkill.
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance (1985)
Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem "Darkness"
A Prescription for Hope (1985)