Top 40 John Hersey Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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 Hersey

2. “Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.”

— John Hersey

3. “The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.”

— John Hersey

4. “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 Hersey

5. “Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them.”

— John Hersey

6. “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 Hersey

7. “There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”

— John Hersey

8. “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 Hersey

9. “Yes, people of Hiroshima died manly in the atomic bombing, believing that it was for Emperor’s sake.”

— John Hersey

10. “A YEAR after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto’s church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same.”

— John Hersey

11. “Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.”

— John Hersey

12. “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 Hersey

13. “Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery.”

— John Hersey

14. “As for the use of the bomb, she would say, “It was war and we had to expect it.” And then she would add, “Shikata ga nai,” a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word “nichevo”: “It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.” Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German: “Da ist nichts zu machen. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

— John Hersey

15. “Events are less important than our responses to them.”

— John Hersey

16. “It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.”

— John Hersey

17. “A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one street-car instead of the next that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time none of them knew anything.”

— John Hersey

18. “In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt.”

— John Hersey

19. “Mankind must destroy anti-humanity before it becomes extinct itself.”

— John Hersey

20. “These four did not realize it, but they were coming down with the strange, capricious disease which came later to be known as radiation sickness.”

— John Hersey

21. “It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose.”

— John Hersey

22. “To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.”

— John Hersey

23. “Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred.”

— John Hersey

24. “His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.”

— John Hersey

25. “Dr. Wyman preached a God I couldn’t quite see in my mind, and certainly couldn’t love. I dimly pictured some kind of Grandfather, who dealt out to bad people their awful “just deserts,” which I thought must be poisoned food at the end of delicious meals.”

— John Hersey

26. “My two major faults are that I row too long and pick up too many women.”

— John Hersey

27. “Over everything – up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks – was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them.”

— John Hersey

28. “America is on its way into Europe. You can be as isolationist as you want to be, but there is a fact. Our armies are on their way in. Just as truly as Europe once invaded us, with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave of sons of immigrants.”

— John Hersey

29. “Thus a translation of a translation brought us together, but I can see now that we were still very far apart, farther apart indeed than languages, even though we had laughed together, for our laugher was cruel, as laughter often is. I was laughing at the awkwardness of a Chinese mind, the translator’s; Su-ling at the awkwardness of a Western mind, mine.”

— John Hersey

30. “The price one pays for having a kind man at one’s elbow.”

— John Hersey

31. “The frequency of the warnings and the continued abstinence of Mr. B with respect to Hiroshima had made its citizens jittery; a rumor was going around that the Americans were saving something special for the city.”

— John Hersey

32. “ABOUT a week after the bomb dropped, a vague, incomprehensible rumor reached Hiroshima – that the city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two.”

— John Hersey

33. “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 Hersey

34. “Such clouds of dust had risen that there was a sort of twilight around.”

— John Hersey

35. “The class of people to which Nakamura-san belonged came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, “hibakusha” – literally, “explosion-affected persons.”

— John Hersey

36. “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 Hersey

37. “Cacopardo stepped back, and raised his hand in a Fascist salute. Then, as his aged memory functioned, the hand wavered over to his forehead, and the salute became military. And he said: “Cacopardo is sulphur and sulphur is Cacopardo.”

— John Hersey

38. “It was so black under the books and debris that the borderline between awareness and unconsciousness was fine; she apparently crossed it several times, for the pain seemed to come and go.”

— John Hersey

39. “And now that I think back, I realize the real gap between us lay in the fact that I, who was so proud of coming from the swift-winged world of science, was laughing at an old world where it was possible seriously to believe that men die young of the bad habit of failing to go out on a dangerous river to gaze at the earth when it turns overnight into silver.”

— John Hersey

40. “I have very little,” he said, and he spoke as if having little were the greatest fortune, and the greatest buffer against the future, that a man could wish.”

— John Hersey