Top 40 Richard Rhodes Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The technology that made possible long-distance pipeline construction was electric arc welding.”

— Richard Rhodes

2. “The concoction of the Protocols was probably the work of the head of the czarist secret police outside Russia, a Paris-based agent named Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky. Borrowing and paraphrasing Machiavelli’s speeches without even bothering to change their order and attributing them to a secret Jewish council, Rachkovsky was attempting to discredit Russian liberalism by showing it to be a Jewish plot.”

— Richard Rhodes

3. “Kapitza frequently opened discussions with deliberate howlers so that even the youngest would speak up to correct him, loosening the grip of tradition on their necks.”

— Richard Rhodes

4. “Protocols of the Elders of Zion, supposedly a transcription of a secret Jewish council’s plans to subvert legitimate governments and take over the world, were sold internationally in the 1920s and 1930s; Henry Ford took the forgery as literally as Adolf Hitler did.”

— Richard Rhodes

5. “Violence is an instrumentality, not a psychopathology or a character disorder. Violence is a means to an end – domination and control – one of many possible means. Since its essence is injury, its efficacy in the long term is marginal, but its short-term advantages are obvious.”

— Richard Rhodes

6. “British experimenters used Bank of England sealing wax to make glass tubes airtight.”

— Richard Rhodes

7. “The Manhattan District bore no relation to the industrial or social life of our country; it was a separate state, with its own airplanes and its own factories and its thousands of secrets. It had a peculiar sovereignty, one that could bring about the end, peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties.”

— Richard Rhodes

8. “The practice of science was not itself a science; it was an art, to be passed from master to apprentice as the art of painting is passed or as the skills and traditions of the law or of medicine are passed.”

— Richard Rhodes

9. “Bohr’s office, borrowed from Albert Einstein. It was spacious, with leaded windows, a fireplace, a large blackboard, an Oriental rug to warm the floor.1089.”

— Richard Rhodes

10. “Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read.392 Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was exceptionally late in learning – or choosing – to talk.393 His grandfather warned his parents that he might be retarded, but when Teller finally spoke, at three, he spoke in complete sentences.”

— Richard Rhodes

11. “But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big guns and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent to modern eyes.”

— Richard Rhodes

12. “In the real world it is meaningless to doubt existence; the doubt itself demonstrates the existence of the doubter.”

— Richard Rhodes

13. “In ten days and 1,600 sorties the Twentieth Air Force burned out 32 square miles of the centers of Japan’s four largest cities and killed at least 150,000 people and almost certainly tens of thousands more.”

— Richard Rhodes

14. “Giving such violent caretakers second chances, as social workers and judges frequently do, with the best of intentions – attributing their violence to poverty or racial prejudice and propping them up with counseling, household helpers and other resources – cannot reverse their violentization. To the contrary, such endorsement implicitly authorizes further violence and makes the state complicit with the violators.”

— Richard Rhodes

15. “He even found time on the day of the occupation to worry about the large gold Nobel Prize medals that Max von Laue and James Franck had given him for safekeeping.1290 Exporting gold from Germany was a serious criminal offense and their names were engraved on the medals.1291, 1292 George de Hevesy devised an effective solution – literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out the war innocently on a laboratory shelf.”

— Richard Rhodes

16. “I try not to speak more clearly than I think.”

— Richard Rhodes

17. “Fermi thought plutonium production needed an area a mile wide and two miles long for safety. Compton proposed building piles of increasing power to work up to full-scale production and was considering alternative sites in the Lake Michigan Dunes area and in the Tennessee Valley.”

— Richard Rhodes

18. “Bohr had learned to be alert for bright students who were not afraid to argue.”

— Richard Rhodes

19. “The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the systems of checks and balances science has established – and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid on the basis of these scientific checks.”

— Richard Rhodes

20. “With personal intervention on behalf of the principle of openness, which exposes crime as well as error to public view, Niels Bohr played a decisive part in the rescue of the Danish Jews.”

— Richard Rhodes

21. “It is wrong,” he told his colleagues repeatedly, “to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is” – which is the territory classical physics had claimed for itself. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”290.”

— Richard Rhodes

22. “Violent actors act violently not because they are mentally ill or come from violent subcultures or are brain damaged or have low self-esteem but because they have different phantom communities from the rest of us. That difference is the reason they attach different, violent meanings to their social experiences.”

— Richard Rhodes

23. “The 509th commander introduced Parsons, who wasted no words. He told the crews the bomb they were going to drop was something new in the history of warfare, the most destructive weapon ever made: it would probably almost totally destroy an area three miles across.”

— Richard Rhodes

24. “Rutherford’s and Soddy’s discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs.”

— Richard Rhodes

25. “The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer’s vocabulary – Fermi was only then inventing that specialty – but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city.”

— Richard Rhodes

26. “The world is full of terrible suffering, compared to which the small inconveniences of my childhood are as a drop of rain in the sea.”

— Richard Rhodes

27. “Fermi, superb experimentalist that he was, contributed valuably to the program of experimental studies, defining with clarity problems that needed to be examined. For him the war work was duty, however, and the eager conviction he found on the Hill puzzled him. “After he had sat in on one of his first conferences here,” Oppenheimer recalls, “he turned to me and said, ‘I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.’ I remember his voice sounded surprised.”

— Richard Rhodes

28. “When people look at a dangerous violent criminal at the beginning of his developmental process rather than at the very end of it, they will see, perhaps unexpectedly, that the dangerous violent criminal began as a relatively benign human being for whom they would probably have more sympathy than antipathy.”

— Richard Rhodes

29. “They all thought that civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening.” Szilard held no such sanguine view, noting that the Germans themselves were paralyzed with cynicism, one of the uglier effects on morals of losing a major war.”

— Richard Rhodes

30. “But while Poland had welcomed them, Russia despised them. Its economy was too primitive to need their commercial skills and it abhorred their religion. To Catherine the Great her one million new subjects were first and foremost “the enemies of Christ.”

— Richard Rhodes

31. “The best way to do the job, Polanyi argued, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing.”

— Richard Rhodes

32. “Bohr, for his part, supple pragmatist and democrat that he was, never an absolutist, heard once too often about Einstein’s personal insight into the gambling habits of the Deity. He scolded his distinguished colleague finally in Einstein’s own terms. God does not throw dice? “Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world.”502.”

— Richard Rhodes

33. “Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society.”

— Richard Rhodes

34. “Einstein had judged it too large and moved into a small secretarial annex nearby.”

— Richard Rhodes

35. “Nations existed in a condition of international anarchy. No hierarchical authority defined their relations with one another. They negotiated voluntarily as self-interest moved them and took what they could get. War had been their final negotiation, brutally resolving their worst disputes. Now an ultimate power had appeared.”

— Richard Rhodes

36. “84 percent of the theoreticians were the sons of professional men, typically engineers, physicians and teachers, although a minority of experimentalists were farmers’ sons.”

— Richard Rhodes

37. “About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.”

— Richard Rhodes

38. “This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.”

— Richard Rhodes

39. “Science grew out of the craft tradition.”

— Richard Rhodes

40. “How much the world lost that September is immeasurable. The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.”

— Richard Rhodes

41. “At the leading edges of science, at the threshold of the truly new, the threat has often nearly overwhelmed. Thus Rutherford’s shock at rebounding alpha particles, “quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life.” Thus Heisenberg’s “deep alarm” when he came upon his quantum mechanics, his hallucination of looking through “the surface of atomic phenomena” into “a strangely beautiful interior” that left him giddy.”

— Richard Rhodes

42. “The Germans sometimes chose to disguise mustard with xylyl bromide, a tear gas that smells like lilac, and so it came to pass in the wartime spring that men ran in terror from a breeze scented with blossoming lilac shrubs.”

— Richard Rhodes

43. “We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects – hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments – can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar behavior of one type of atom. Spencer R. Weart.”

— Richard Rhodes