Jonathan Schell - The Fate of the Earth (1982)

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What happened at Hiroshima was less than a millionth part of a holocaust at present levels of world nuclear armament.

Jonathan Schell
Either we will sink into a final coma and end it all or, as I trust and believe, we will awaken to the truth of our peril, a truth as great as life itself, and, like a person who has swallowed a lethal poison but shakes off his stupor at the last moment and vomits the poison up, we will break through the layers of our denials, put aside our fainthearted excuses, and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons.

Jonathan Schell
The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the 'button' to be 'pushed' by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point--that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment--is a fact against which belief rebels.

Jonathan Schell
The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact it should be seen at the very center of the ecological crisis, as the cloud-covered Everest of which the more immediate, visible kinds of harm to the environment are the mere foothills.

Jonathan Schell
Reason must sit at the knee of instinct and learn reverence for the miraculous instinctual capacity for creation.

Jonathan Schell