Bernard Lown quotes

We physicians have focused on the nuclear threat as the singular issue of our era. We are not indifferent to other human rights and hard-won civil liberties. But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others; the right to survival. (Bernard Lown)
Every historic period has had its Cassandras. Our era is the first in which prophecies of doom stem from objective scientific analyses. View quote
Bernard Lown
We must convince each generation that they are but transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity's past nor dim its future. View quote
Bernard Lown
Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem Darkness. View quote
Bernard Lown
The hope of a benevolent civilization was shattered in the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War. The "war to end all wars" claimed sixteen million lives, and left embers which kindled an even more catastrophic conflagration. View quote
Bernard Lown
The reason, the creativeness, and the courage that human beings possess foster an abiding faith that what humanity creates, humanity can and will control. View quote
Bernard Lown
It is a statistical certainly that hair-trigger readiness cannot endure as a permanent condition. View quote
Bernard Lown
We recognise that before abolition can become a reality, the nuclear arms race must be halted. View quote
Bernard Lown
But the Second World War introduced total war, unprincipled in method, unlimited in violence, and indiscriminate in victims. View quote
Bernard Lown
We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity that each of us is being continuously targeted for extinction. We protest the ongoing increase in overkill. View quote
Bernard Lown
We must hold fast to the dream that reason will prevail. (Bernard Lown)
The prolonged agony which left 50 million dead did not provide an enduring basis for an armistice to barbarism. View quote
Bernard Lown
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. View quote
Bernard Lown
The imagined enemy is eventually banished from the human family and reduced to an inanimate object whose annihilation loses all moral dimension. View quote
Bernard Lown
For the first time science and medicine can diminish drudgery and pain. Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible. View quote
Bernard Lown
Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem "Darkness": I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless; and the icy Earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went - and came, and brought no day,... All earth was but one thought - and that was Death... View quote
Bernard Lown
Paranoid fantasies of a dehumanized adversary cannot withstand the common pursuit of healing and preventing illness. View quote
Bernard Lown
May we learn from barbaric and bloody deeds of the twentieth century and bestow the gift of peace to the next millennium. View quote
Bernard Lown
As no national interest would justify inflicting genocide on the victim and suicide on the aggressor, a prevalent misconception is that nuclear war will never be fought. View quote
Bernard Lown
Throughout human history, when confronted with what was deemed a deadly enemy, the fixed human response has been to gather more rocks, muskets, cannons, and now nuclear bombs. View quote
Bernard Lown
We physicians who shepherd human life from birth to death have a moral imperative to resist with all our being the drift toward the brink. (Bernard Lown)
The advent of the nuclear age posed an unprecedented question: not whether war would exact yet more lives but whether war would preclude human existence altogether. View quote
Bernard Lown
Summits like those in Geneva promote hope. But hope without action is hopeless. View quote
Bernard Lown
All nations share a linked destiny; nuclear weapons are their shared enemy. View quote
Bernard Lown
We physicians who shepherd human life from birth to death have a moral imperative to resist with all our being the drift toward the brink. The threatened inhabitants on this fragile planet must speak out for those yet unborn, for posterity has no lobby with politicians. View quote
Bernard Lown