Denise Kiernan > Quotes

“They fought to smile through the lines and the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government, an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“So the Next time September 17 rolls around, eat a hot dog, watch some fireworks, and celebrate Constitution Day - that fateful date in 1787 when thirty-nine sweaty men dressed in stockings signed their names to the United States Constitution.”
― Denise Kiernan, Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence

“A dictator decrees,” she later wrote, “a president asks Congress for permission to organize.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“Case in point: On one of their first dates, he brought her a box of Ivory Flakes soap. Who needs flowers? Roses fade, but flaky soap available from the PX lasted months. Having Ivory Flakes was a rarity in itself, and also saved her valuable time—one less line to stand in, only to find that the grocer was out. Again. That was romance, as far as Colleen was concerned. Maybe this guy was a keeper after all.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“The "hillbilly" girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had...The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls...had been trained like soldiers. Do what you're told. Don't ask why.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“It was a time of repurposing. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,” was the motto of the time.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“Despite their marriage license and four children, black couples were not permitted to live as man and wife on the Reservation.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“We don’t matriculate engineering as a major for females,”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time–just under three years–is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower, and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went into the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“On occasion, people who tried to write family members living at Site X by addressing the letters to “Oak Ridge” got those letters returned to sender with a note reading simply: “There is no such place as Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“She deemed Fermi’s work inconclusive, and in late 1934, she published her views on Fermi’s findings in an article titled “Über Das Element 93” (On Element 93), in which she proposed an idea that seemed unrealistic”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“Mrs. Gerry was an outstanding figure here,” the paper noted, “not because she tried to be, but because she couldn’t help being.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“Q: How many people are working in Oak Ridge? A: About half of them.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“The most ambitious war project in military history rested squarely on the shoulders of tens of thousands of ordinary people, many of them young women.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“It turned out that between 1945 and 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium, specifically: 11 at Rochester, New York, 3 at the University of Chicago, 3 at UC San Francisco, and 1, Ebb Cade, at Oak Ridge. Several thousand human radiation experiments were conducted between 1944 and 1974. In 1994, President Clinton appointed the Advisory Committee of Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to investigate these and other experiments funded by the United States government. Their final report was published in 1996.”
― Denise Kiernan

“Elbridge Gerry, the fifth vice president of the United States—under President James Madison—and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. (Due to his incessant fiddling with voter districts in Massachusetts to shape them in his favor, Elbridge Gerry infamously inspired the term “gerrymandering.”)”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“One of the Project’s more enthusiastic, ambitious, optimistic, and inspirational characters, Ernest Lawrence found it impossible to believe what the District Engineer was saying: Those high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee to operate his calutrons in Y-12 were doing it better than his own team of scientists. In Berkeley, only PhDs had been allowed to operate the panels controlling the electromagnetic separation units. When Tennessee Eastman suggested turning over the operation of Lawrence’s calutrons to a bunch of young women fresh off the farm with nothing more than a public school education, the Nobel Prize winner was skeptical. But it was decided Lawrence’s team would work out the kinks for the calutron units and then pass control to the female operators.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”
― Denise Kiernan, We Gather Together: A Nation Divided, a President in Turmoil, and a Historic Campaign to Embrace Gratitude and Grace

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“World War II left no life untouched. An estimated 16 million American men had gone off to fight. More than 400,000 lost their lives. Military and civilian deaths worldwide were estimated to be as high as 80 million.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“Conformity,” she wrote, “is the bane of middle class communities.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we forge too deeply into the planet there will be a reckoning—who knows?”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“So ended a day many had dreaded,” Natalie wrote in her diary on Christmas Day, “but by doing and thinking of others, we had forgotten self.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“May your joys be as many as the sands of the sea,”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“Half the pleasure in life comes from learning to choose between things.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“The more she thought about it, the more she realized: Oak Ridgers had kept the most amazing secret ever.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

“nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. “Nothing any good isn’t hard.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“The rich sought to conquer one another on battlefields of architectural grandeur. Society fought wars in ballrooms and twinkling parlors, wielding the most haute of designers and decor as their weapons of choice, Italian marble beneath their feet.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Last Castle

“Forget jumping grains of sand—that was enough energy to displace a chunk of desert.”
― Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II