Christopher Barclay

“What I learned was more than sufficient to impress upon me the horror, the real danger, and the utter insanity of thermonuclear warfare, which threatens everyone on earth. Our reports, and the conferences where we discussed a strategic thermonuclear strike on a potential enemy, transformed the unthinkable and monstrous into a subject for detailed investigation and calculation ... I could not stop thinking about this, and I came to realize that the technical, military, and economic problems are secondary; the fundamental issues are political and ethical. Gradually, subconsciously, I was approaching an irrevocable step—a wide-ranging public statement on war and peace and other global issues.”
― Andrei Sakharov

“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him—he has known a fear beyond every other.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“I spit on fools who fail to include breasts in their metaphysics, // Star-gazers who have not enumerated them among the moons of the earth”
― Charles Simic, New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012