Chernobyl Quotes

At 1.24 am on 26 April 1986 Chernobyl's Unit 4 reactor exploded after staff disabled safety systems and performed an ill-advised experiment to check – ironically enough – the reactor's safety. ~ Mark Lynas

One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States' Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets. ~ James E. Lovelock

This may read like a mad journey through some of the most dangerous places on earth, but it is much more than that as well. Sheets witnessed most of the wars, disasters, and revolutions that followed the end of communism, and his accounts of them
from Chechnya to Chernobyl, and from Abkhazia to Afghanistan
serve as a passionate but considered obituary for the vanished Soviet empire. ~ Oliver Bullough

Buy potatoes," he said. "Gotta hop." Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them. ~ Michael Lewis

The child affixes one of her little pictures to my refrigerator.
She asks, Can you detect the radiation?

There is a house, one tree, and grass in dark slashes. A sun
shining. Beneath, in her child letters, she has written Chernobyl.

At kindergarten they must be having nuclear energy week.

One could look at the picture and say everything is in order.
No, I say, I cannot see the radiation.

The radiation poison, she says, sits
inside the apple and the apple looks pretty. Then singsongs,

Bury the apple and bury the shovel that buried the apple
and put the apple-burier person in a closet forever.

We are both thinking Then bury the burier.
Both thinking of her picture with no people.

The poison sits inside the people and the people
still look pretty, she says. ~ Darcie Dennigan

The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: ~ Geert Mak

Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

We're afraid of everything. We're afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don't exist yet. They don't exist, and we're already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone's depressed. It's a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it's changed our everyday life, and our thinking. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

We have witnessed Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Seveso, Amoco Cadiz, Three Mile Island and have still not wakened from our fantasy that large organizations can carry out complex technologies on a huge scale with total perfection. ~ Donella Meadows

I want to make a film, to see everything through the eyes of an animal. "What are you shooting?" people say to me. "Look around you. There's a war on in Chechnya." But Saint Francis preached to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if these birds spoke to him in their bird language, and it wasn't he who condescended to them? ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Why are you raising such a fuss? I'll come and shut down your reactor with my ass alone. ~ Serhii Plokhy

Flying in a modern jet airplane doses the human with levels of radiation comparable to those found in nuclear disaster zones. ~ Steven Magee

That's what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit. ~ Joe Hill

Natural gas is highly explosive, invisible, poisonous, and odorless. Yet we accept natural gas, even though it kills not two but 400 Americans a year, because it was introduced before we got crazy about risk. We accept coal, even though mining it is nasty and filthy and kills dozens of people every year. By contrast, we're terrified of nuclear energy. Chernobyl, the worst nuclear power disaster ever, killed only 30 people. Some say the radiation may eventually kill others, but even if that's true, natural gas kills more people every year. ~ John Stossel

We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

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

This is what they mean by 'ghost town', she thought. It truly feels like a place frozen in time ~ Jeremy Robinson

I was flipping back and forth between do and don't quicker than they were serving up flapjacks down at the diner, he was getting closer to me.... close enough that I could smell him.... smell the heat that he threw off and that other certain energy that was pouring off of him right now at levels I'd not seen since Chernobyl. If I didn't move soon, I'd be in trouble... or ecstasy. ~ Donna Augustine

To my real estate agent, Chernobyl is a fixer-upper. ~ Yakov Smirnoff

The doctors said that I got sick because my father worked at Chernobyl. And after that I was born. I love my father. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: "You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl." He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn't believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. "She should at least have fingers," I thought. "She's a girl. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Everything we know of horror and dread is connected primarily with war. Stalin's Gulags and Auschwitz were recent gains for evil. History has always been the story of wars and military commanders, and war was, we could say, the yardstick of horror. This is why people muddle the concepts of war and disaster. In Chernobyl, we see all the hallmarks of war: hordes of soldiers, evacuation, abandoned houses. The course of life disrupted. Reports on Chernobyl in the newspapers are thick with the language of war: 'nuclear', 'explosion', 'heroes'. And this makes it harder to appreciate that we now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun. But people do not want to reflect on that, because they have never thought about it before, preferring to take refuge in the familiar. And in the past. Even the monuments to the Chernobyl heroes look like war memorials. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of the waters; and the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. ~ Frederik Pohl

I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father ~ Svetlana Alexievich

My father is standing at the sink wearing a too-tight long-sleeved red T-Shirt, a pair of too-high jeans and sporting the type of orange glow that belongs only on Chernobyl victims. Plus his hair looks like an oil spill.
'Hey you,' he says, washing what looks to be some carrots under the sink. Are they carrots or are they parsnips reflecting the sheen of my father's tangerine skin? Hard to tell.
'You've fake tanned yourself again,' I say - it's a statement, not a question. 'Too much?' he says, innocently. 'I just didn't want to be one of those pasty office workers and I thought it wouldn't hurt to back up last week's application with another hit.'
'Dad, you look-'
'Sun kissed?'
'Radioactive. And what the hell happened to your hands?'
- Cat ~ Rebecca Sparrow

Ukraine announced plans to open Chernobyl, their nuclear disaster site, to tourists. They say it's just like Disneyland, except the 6-foot mouse is real. ~ Conan O'Brien

I make my way back whistling. Gerry nods towards Mrs Brady who is standing beside the trolleys.
Morning, Mrs Brady, I say cheerfully.
I push her provisions out to the car.
Things are something terrible, she says. You can't trust anybody.
No.
It's come to a sorry pass.
It has.
There's hormones in the beef and tranquillizers in the bacon. There's men with breasts and women with mickeys. All from eating meat.
Now.
I steer a path between a crowd of people while she keeps step alongside.
Can you believe it - they're feeding the pigs Valium. If you boil a bit of bacon you have to lie down afterwards. Dear oh dear.
Yes, I nod.
The thought of food makes me ill.
The pigs are getting depressed in those sheds. If they get depressed they lose weight. So they tranquillize them. Where will it end?
I don't know, Mrs Brady, I say. I begin filling the boot.
That's why I started buying lamb. Then along came Chernobyl. Now you can't even have lamb stew or you'll light up at night! I swear. And when they've left you with nothing safe to eat, next thing they come along and tell you you can't live in your own house.
I haven't heard of that one, Mrs Brady.
Listen to me. She took my elbow. It could all happen that you're in your own house and the next thing is there's radiation bubbling under the floorboards.
What?
It comes right at you through the foundations. Watch the yogurts. Did you hear of that?
Dermot Healy

The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima - so it's more visible. ~ Bill Gates

There you are: a normal person. A little person. You're just like everyone else - you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You're a normal person! And then one day you're suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone's interested in, and that no one knows anything about. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Even if it's poisoned with radiation, it's still my home. There's no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Even if you look at the 'Paranormal Activity' movies, at the end of the movie things get really crazy and nutty, but they all start in a very mundane situation that people can relate to, and that's also to some degree what we tried to do in 'Chernobyl Diaries.' ~ Oren Peli

Another thing we wanted to do, a lot of shows or movies that are in the future or the post-apocalyptic are very bleached, desaturated desert environments and we wanted to do the opposite of that. There's always talk about Chernobyl and the world that environment has recovered has become this idyllic, bizarrely refuge for wildlife. ~ Miles Millar

So we can simulate Richter-10 earthquakes. We simulate 70-foot waves coming into these things. Very cool. We basically say no human should ever be required to do anything, because if you judge by Chernobyl and Fukushima, the human element is not on your side. ~ Bill Gates

I think the wildest wildlife you can find these days is in Chernobyl, where wolves are running around breeding quite well in the nuclear disaster zones. ~ Aleksandra Mir

Cesium, iodine from the Chernobyl reactor accident went around the world many times and everyone on the Earth has a piece of Chernobyl in their bodies, but it's very tiny - too small to cause much damage. ~ Michio Kaku

Nuclear power must be dealt with irrationally ... Nuclear plants are carcinogens. Let's get that story out ... Their lies will catch up to them. We need endless Chernobyl reminders. ~ Ralph Nader

Chernobyl haunts us with the reminder that all of man's ambitions are ephemeral. Our grandest designs and sturdiest monuments, ~ Josh Gates

No, I was just thinking about Chernobyl. That's like a scream from the universe warning us, but we're not paying any attention. ~ Christopher Durang

In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke ... about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society. ~ Sam Kinison

The commentator says: The West is trying to spread panic, telling lies about the accident. And then they show the dosimeter again, measuring some fish on a plate, or a chocolate bar, or some pancakes at an open pancake stand. It was all a lie. The military dosimeters then in use by our armed forces were designed to measure the radioactive background, not individual products. This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Before Chernobyl or without Chernobyl the nuclear power was the safe thing. ~ Abdus Salam

There are some remarks that are so stupid that to be even vaguely aware of them is the intellectual equivalent of living next door to Chernobyl. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant ... has painfully affected the Soviet people, and shocked the international community. For the first time, we confront the real force of nuclear energy, out of control. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

The Chernobyl technology is different from the technology which is used in the west, mainly. ~ Abdus Salam

To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants. It doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies? ~ HBO

With something like Chernobyl, the public reaction was 'Oh, my God, science has really done wrong.' ~ George Smoot

In fact, all of us have a piece of Chernobyl in our bodies going back to 1986. ~ Michio Kaku

Chernobyl, an accident or the most successful anti-Marxist attack in recorded history? ~ Anders Breivik

There was genuine affection. Mom knew all this. "Thank God Eloise is uglier than a cow living near Chernobyl," Mom liked to say. "Or I might wonder." Dad ~ Harlan Coben

... Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution."
"It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did.
"You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to. ~ Rebecca McNutt

Is there anything more frightening than people? ~ Svetlana Alexievich

My prayer is simple. I say it silently. 'Lord, i cry unto me! Give ear!' Man is crafty only in evil, but he's so simple and open in his plain words of love. Even for philosophers, the word is only an approximation of the thought they have experienced. The word genuinely attunes to what's in our soul only in prayer, and in prayerful thoughts. I can feel it physically. 'Lord, I cry unto me! Give ear!' And man too. Man frightens me, but I always like meeting one. A good man. That's it. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming. That's why we have this love of floods and fires and other catastrophes. We need an opportunity to demonstrate our "courage and heroism. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

At first we were all turned into animals. The very word "Chernobyl" is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look at you. He's from there! That ~ Svetlana Alexievich

(More radioactive material fell on Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as a result of Chernobyl than from Three Mile Island.) ~ William Tucker

Eighteen years since the Chernobyl disaster. Is it just me surprized? Still no superheroes! ~ Jimmy Carr

She'd never set a fantasy in a ski lodge, but she was thinking about it now. She couldn't help it. The man was throwing off pheromones like he was a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Sitting so close to ground zero, the fallout was lethal. ~ Rachel Gibson