John Richard Hersey Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.

John Richard Hersey
What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

John Richard Hersey
Learning starts with failure, the first failure is the beginning of education.

John Richard Hersey
The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing. Its first symptom was falling hair. Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next.

John Richard Hersey
There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

John Richard Hersey
To my great surprise, I never heard anyone cry out in the disorder, even though they suffered in great agony. They died in silence, with no grudge, setting their teeth to bear it. All for the country!

John Richard Hersey
The reality is that changes are coming... They must come. You must share in bringing them.

John Richard Hersey
There is one sacred rule of journalism. The writer must not invent. The legend on the licence must read: None of this was made up.

John Richard Hersey
Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.

John Richard Hersey
There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror.... Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker.

John Richard Hersey
The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?

John Richard Hersey
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

John Richard Hersey
I thought of God as being able to talk big and write *very* small.

John Richard Hersey
The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.

John Richard Hersey
The third stage was the reaction that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills - when, for instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased to much higher than normal levels.

John Richard Hersey