Joseph Rotblat Quotes
Polish - Physicist November 4, 1908 - August 31, 2005

The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.
Joseph Rotblat

The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble.
Joseph Rotblat

Let me remind you that nuclear disarmament is not just an ardent desire of the people, as expressed in many resolutions of the United Nations. It is a legal commitment by the five official nuclear states, entered into when they signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Joseph Rotblat

The chief task was to stop the arms race before it brought utter disaster. However, after the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, any rationale for having nuclear weapons disappeared.
Joseph Rotblat

I saw science as being in harmony with humanity.
Joseph Rotblat

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.
Joseph Rotblat

At a time when science plays such a powerful role in the life of society, when the destiny of the whole of mankind may hinge on the results of scientific research, it is incumbent on all scientists to be fully conscious of that role, and conduct themselves accordingly.
Joseph Rotblat

But scientists on both sides of the iron curtain played a very significant role in maintaining the momentum of the nuclear arms race throughout the four decades of the Cold War.
Joseph Rotblat

The decision to use the atom bomb on Japanese cities, and the consequent buildup of enormous nuclear arsenals, was made by governments, on the basis of political and military perceptions.
Joseph Rotblat

Indeed, the very first resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations - adopted unanimously - called for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Joseph Rotblat

We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well.
Joseph Rotblat

As for the assertion that nuclear weapons prevent wars, how many more wars are needed to refute this arguments? Tens of millions have died in the many wars that have taken place since 1945.
Joseph Rotblat

But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.
Joseph Rotblat

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.
Joseph Rotblat

There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war. Conversely, it is known that they nearly caused one.
Joseph Rotblat

Long before the terrifying potential of the arms race was recognized, there was a widespread instinctive abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and a strong desire to get rid of them.
Joseph Rotblat

This means that the only function of nuclear weapons, while they exist, is to deter a nuclear attack.
Joseph Rotblat

My third appeal is to my fellow citizens in all countries: Help us to establish lasting peace in the world.
Joseph Rotblat

I did not imagine that the second half of my life would be spent on efforts to avert a mortal danger to humanity created by science.
Joseph Rotblat

So I ask the nuclear powers to abandon the out-of-date thinking of the Cold War period and take a fresh look. Above all, I appeal to them to bear in mind the long-term threat that nuclear weapons pose to humankind and to begin action towards their elimination.
Joseph Rotblat

The present basic philosophy is nuclear deterrence.
Joseph Rotblat

When the START 2 treaty has been implemented - and remember it has not yet been ratified - we will be left with some 15,000 nuclear warheads, active and in reserve. Fifteen thousand weapons with an average yield of 20 Hiroshima bombs.
Joseph Rotblat

All nuclear weapon states should now recognize that this is so, and declare - in Treaty form - that they will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. This would open the way to the gradual, mutual reduction of nuclear arsenals, down to zero.
Joseph Rotblat

But the nuclear powers still cling tenaciously to their weapons.
Joseph Rotblat

I appeal to my fellow scientists to remember their responsibility to humanity.
Joseph Rotblat

Since the end of the Cold War two main nuclear powers have begun to make big reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Each of them is dismantling about 2,000 nuclear warheads a year.
Joseph Rotblat

The time has come to formulate guidelines for the ethical conduct of scientist, perhaps in the form of a voluntary Hippocratic Oath.
Joseph Rotblat

From my earliest days I had a passion for science.
Joseph Rotblat

If the militarily most powerful - and least threatened - states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.
Joseph Rotblat

Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.
Joseph Rotblat

Several studies, and a number of public statements by senior military and political personalities, testify that - except for disputes between the present nuclear states - all military conflicts, as well as threats to peace, can be dealt with using conventional weapons.
Joseph Rotblat

To sum up, there is no evidence that a world without nuclear weapons would be a dangerous world. On the contrary, it would be a safer world, as I will show later.
Joseph Rotblat


Walter Cronkite Quotes
American - Journalist November 4, 1916 - July 17, 2009

Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.
Walter Cronkite

I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.
Walter Cronkite

We all have our likes and our dislikes. But... when we're doing news - when we're doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we're doing the daily news, covering politics - it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.
Walter Cronkite

America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
Walter Cronkite

Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.
Walter Cronkite

The military people don't like it; the government probably doesn't like it, but the people should know what they're sending their young people into when they permit their governments to declare war and engage in war.
Walter Cronkite

I wanted to have more time to play and reflect, but I find retirement more stressful than having a nice, steady job because I have to make decisions about where I want to be.
Walter Cronkite

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.
Walter Cronkite

We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.
Walter Cronkite

And that's the way it is.
Walter Cronkite

Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough.
Walter Cronkite

A liberal to me is one who - and it suits some of the dictionary definitions - is unbeholden to any specific belief or party or group or person, but makes up his or her mind on the basis of the facts and the presentation of those facts at the time. That defines what I am.
Walter Cronkite

It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace.
Walter Cronkite

History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.
Walter Cronkite

I haven't quite got the hang of this retirement thing.
Walter Cronkite

It's hard for us to really understand the immensity so far of the conquest of space.
Walter Cronkite

Our job is only to hold up the mirror - to tell and show the public what has happened.
Walter Cronkite

I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got.
Walter Cronkite

I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since.
Walter Cronkite

I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.
Walter Cronkite

I think somebody ought to do a survey as to how many great, important men have quit to spend time with their families who spent any more time with their family.
Walter Cronkite

I worry that we're not getting enough of the news that we need to make informed judgments as citizens.
Walter Cronkite

A journalist covering politics, most of us are aware of the necessity to try to be sure we're unbiased in our reporting. That's one of the fundamentals of good journalism.
Walter Cronkite

The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programmes have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings.
Walter Cronkite

Grandfather was an old-fashioned pharmacist who never ceased venting his resentment at the growing number of retail items the drugstore had to carry, and he would go into periods of fearful rage when the subject of chain stores was raised.
Walter Cronkite

We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law and the judicial system to bring the criminals to justice before they have the opportunity to build military forces that use these horrid weapons that rogue nations and movements can get hold of - germs and atomic weapons.
Walter Cronkite

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.
Walter Cronkite

With police wielding unprecedented powers to invade privacy, tap phones and conduct searches seemingly at random, our civil liberties are in a very precarious condition.
Walter Cronkite

I had as much time to prepare for that moon landing as NASA did, and I still was speechless when it happened. It just was so awe-inspiring to actually be able to see the thing through the television that was a miracle in itself.
Walter Cronkite

I've gone from the most trusted man in America to one of the most debated.
Walter Cronkite

Watergate just happened to come along at the same time as the demand for honesty in relations between the sexes, in advertising, in ecology, in almost everything. It just stumbled into that great big elephant trap that had already been built for it.
Walter Cronkite

Give news a little more time, and don't request that they also, in their news time, entertain. We're not entertainers. We're journalists. And we need more time to do our job well.
Walter Cronkite

In the early stages of our involvement in Vietnam, basically I felt that our course was right. My concern grew with the concern of the American people.
Walter Cronkite

The successful landing on the moon, very probably, is the best story.
Walter Cronkite

I have never voted a party line. I vote on the individual and the issues.
Walter Cronkite

I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor - not a commentator or analyst.
Walter Cronkite

We have overcome some terrible blows to our democracy, to the future of our democracy, to the future of our nation. We survived the Civil War and the strife that tore this nation apart.
Walter Cronkite

There were a few youthful fishing trips, but I never enjoyed the experiences, partly because I didn't like hurting the bait.
Walter Cronkite

With all this dolling up and featuring of the news, it's getter harder and harder just to get the facts of the story.
Walter Cronkite

Anchormen shouldn't cry.
Walter Cronkite

No, I don't think my generation got into this dinosaur thing.
Walter Cronkite

We the people have the strength to bring our country from our weak-kneed stumbling gait in the last ranks of reason to the leadership of the great march to environmental victory.
Walter Cronkite

Court proceedings, except for certain limited situations, are open to the public. This is for the protection of the accused, to be certain to ascertain that there is a fair trial.
Walter Cronkite

I think that our comfort is in our history.
Walter Cronkite

On television, I tried to absolutely hew to the middle of the road and not show any prejudice or bias in any way.
Walter Cronkite

Dan Rather and I just aren't especially chummy.
Walter Cronkite

There's a little more ego involved in these jobs than people might realize.
Walter Cronkite

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.
Walter Cronkite

Perhaps if all the peoples of the world understand what war really means, we would eliminate it.
Walter Cronkite

I am joining the hundreds of thousands who shall be marching in the Virtual March on Washington to Stop Global Warming in order to demonstrate the concern that we all hold for the future of our planet and all the living things - flora, fauna, human and animal - that exist upon it.
Walter Cronkite

I think the whole policy of pre-emptive war is a serious, serious mistake.
Walter Cronkite

Part of the new morality of the '60s and '70s is a new attitude toward homosexuality. The homosexual men and women have organized to fight for acceptance and respectability.
Walter Cronkite

I simply told people what I thought about the state of the war in Vietnam, and it was that we better get out of this.
Walter Cronkite

The whole period of the '60s changed a lot of us; there was never a decade like that in American history... to have the decade capture one of the great accomplishments of this century: man landing on the moon.
Walter Cronkite

You think you would react one way when a situation develops and, and when the sharp shells are flying, you don't quite stand up like you think you might.
Walter Cronkite

The very first time a politician puts you in his target is sometimes a disappointment, because perhaps you thought you were friends and getting along well... But it is not something that you dwelled on. At least, I did not.
Walter Cronkite

I looked at the world with the humaneness, I think, which is one of the hallmarks of being liberal in my mind.
Walter Cronkite

I think cameras ought to be everywhere the reporters are allowed to go. I think, furthermore, reporters and cameras ought to be everywhere that the Constitution says the public can go.
Walter Cronkite

I don't think it's in any way harmful, this marriage of media and politicians. I think it enhances the communications process considerably and makes it possible for the public to be far more aware, far more up-to-date on issues and the opposite sides of the issues.
Walter Cronkite

The death of Churchill at 90 was one of those watershed moments in which the obituary rises to a special calling beyond the sharing of remembered times. It gave an older generation a rare opportunity to explain something of itself to its children.
Walter Cronkite

There's no story that breaks, including a five-alarm fire in Brooklyn, that I don't wish I were covering.
Walter Cronkite

I wouldn't give up on the U.N. yet.
Walter Cronkite

If every small nation with a border dispute believes they can go ahead and launch a pre-emptive war and that it will be approved by the greatest power, that is a very dangerous thing.
Walter Cronkite

I do think that the success, although still not complete... in the recognition of equal rights... to all Americans, regardless of color, creed and so forth, was also one of the best stories we've had to report.
Walter Cronkite

I think there are a lot of good pieces that can be covered in 20 minutes that don't need an hour, but by the same token, there are things that need an hour or more.
Walter Cronkite

Cable has come along; many all-news 24 hour cable outlets in the United States. They have cut deeply into the traditional networks' viewing audience.
Walter Cronkite

I write pretty quickly. Write pretty fast. I was an old press service man. That was part of the necessity of that occupation.
Walter Cronkite

I certainly think cameras ought to be in courtrooms.
Walter Cronkite

I can swear on a stack of Bibles that not once in doing the 'CBS Evening News' for 19 years - well, I take it back. Once perhaps. But during 19 years, with perhaps one exception, was I ever aware of any political or commercial pressure on that broadcast whatsoever.
Walter Cronkite

When I stepped down from the evening news at the age of 65, in '81, things were still going well. Immediately after that, the whole tenor of the CBS News Department changed.
Walter Cronkite

I'm one of the best condensers in the business.
Walter Cronkite

I feel no compulsion to be a pundit. As a matter of fact, I really don't have that much to say about most things. Working with hard news satisfies me completely.
Walter Cronkite

Beyond being timely, an obituary has a more subjective duty: to assess its subject's impact.
Walter Cronkite

I suppose popularity is measured by ratings. If a broadcaster is known as the leader because of ratings, then that's where people most want to be seen and heard, so there's no question that there's an advantage.
Walter Cronkite

I can't go into a mob scene and sense the mood and the attitude of the crowd. I can't conduct man-on-the-street interviews or even get reactions that I can be sure are honest, because they know who I am.
Walter Cronkite

A lot of the questions raised about television's power and influence on events have applied throughout history to every mass-communications medium - most particularly print, because that's the medium we've had the longest.
Walter Cronkite

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.
Walter Cronkite

Helping set the day's agenda and deciding what we used and editing it, that was a journalistic high point. I liked reporting as well. Just doing the news - the live performance - wasn't important. Working on the desk was.
Walter Cronkite

I did not believe that the public was sophisticated enough to understand that a newsman could wear several hats and that we had the ability to turn off - nearly, you can't say perfectly, but nearly - all of our prejudices and biases.
Walter Cronkite