Yevgeniy Chazov Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

The human mind finds it difficult to comprehend the figure of 2,000 million victims. As they say, one death is death, but a million deaths are statistics. For us, physicians, life is the aim of our work and each death is a tragedy. As people constantly involved in the care of patients, we felt the urge to warn governments and peoples that the critical point has been passed: medicine will be unable to render even minimal assistance to the victims of a nuclear conflict — the wounded, the burned, the sick — including the population of the country which unleashes nuclear war.

Yevgeniy Chazov
Keep in mind that when the first A-bomb was developed as a defense against Nazism, moral objections and conscience of scientists and many others involved were lulled by assurances that everything would be over after production of a few bombs.

Yevgeniy Chazov
Confrontation is the road to war, destruction and end of civilization. Even today it deprives the world's peoples of hundreds of millions of dollars which are badly needed for solving social problems, combating hunger and diseases.
Cooperation is the road to increased well-being of peoples and flourishing life. Medicine knows many examples when joint efforts to nations and scientists contributed to successful combat against diseases such, for example, as smallpox.

Yevgeniy Chazov
Today we are talking not just about warring sides but about humanity at large. Any reasonable man finds it hard to believe that while hunger, diseases, social inequality, economic underdevelopment and illiteracy are in existence, hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted to feed the insatiable monster — the arms race.

Yevgeniy Chazov
He wasn't a man of erudition, yet very quickly grasped the significance of this or that problem for the state at large and for his own popularity rating. As one far removed from the sciences, he had tremendous respect for the opinions of scientists.

Yevgeniy Chazov
If I am Chernenko's doctor and if I am here, then Chernenko is well because a doctor should be with his patient.

Yevgeniy Chazov
I recall the telegram I received at the time of our first Congress from an ordinary woman in Brooklyn. It was short: "Thank you on behalf of the children."
As adults we are obliged to avert transformation of the Earth from a flourishing planet into a heap of smoking ruins. Our duty is to hand it over to our successors in a better state than it was inherited by us. Therefore, it is not for fame, but for the happiness and for the future of all mothers and children that we — the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War — have worked, are working and will work.

Yevgeniy Chazov