Sam > Sam's Quotes

“In February 1939, a Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City drew 20,000 supporters. Marching to the beat of snare drums, men in Nazi uniforms carrying American flags and swastikas had paraded into the Garden where they were greeted by rally organizers. In front of a towering portrait of George Washington, a speaker exhorted the crowd to “protect ourselves . . . against the slimy conspirators and the parasite hand of Jewish Communism.” Meanwhile, a newsreel camera chronicled Nazi guards beating a lone man who dared to protest.”
― Michael Joseloff, Chasing Heisenberg: The Race for the Atom Bomb

“Adler returned to his father’s Temple Emanu-El in 1873 and preached a sermon on what he called the “Judaism of the Future.” To survive in the modern age, the younger Adler argued, Judaism must renounce its “narrow spirit of exclusion.” Instead of defining themselves by their biblical identity as the “Chosen People,” Jews should distinguish themselves by their social concern and their deeds on behalf of the laboring classes.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus

“Frank Oppenheimer noticed that his brother’s passions were always mercurial. Robert seemed to divide the world into people who were worth his time and those who were not. “For the former group,” Frank said, “it was wonderful. . . . Robert wanted everything and everyone to be special, and his enthusiasms communicated themselves and made these people feel special. . . . Once he had accepted someone as worthy of attention or friendship, he would always be ringing or writing them, doing them small favors, giving them presents. He couldn’t be humdrum. He would even work up those enthusiasms for a brand of cigarettes, even elevating them to something special.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus

“Today unemployment and war constitutes [sic] so serious a threat to the well being and security of the members of our society that many are asking whether that society is capable of meeting its most essential obligations. Communists ask much more of society than this: they ask for all men that opportunity, discipline, and freedom which have characterized the high cultures of the past. But we know that today, with the knowledge and power that are ours, no culture which ignores the elementary needs, no culture based on the denial of opportunity, on indifference to human want, can be either honest or fruitful.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus

“His informality contrasted sharply with the manner of General Groves, who “demanded attention, demanded respect.” Oppie, on the other hand, got attention and respect naturally.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus

“Jackie Oppenheimer later reported Jean as telling her that her psychoanalysis had revealed latent homosexual tendencies. At the time, Freudian analysts regarded homosexuality as a pathological condition to be overcome.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus

“Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus

“Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus

“He worked for Rockefeller?” Oppenheimer said, puffing on his pipe. And then lowering his voice, he quipped, “I, too, have taken money for doing harm.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus

“He did not understand why this was happening but told everyone to continue to believe in G-d, and G-d would save them.”
― Marilyn Shimon, First One In, Last One Out: Auschwitz Survivor 31321

“Morgan recognized that no matter who had physically planted the dynamite, all the city’s white residents were complicit in allowing an environment of hatred and racism to persist.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The failure of many Christians in the South and across the nation to decisively oppose the racism in their families, communities, and even in their own churches provided fertile soil for the seeds of hatred to grow. The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression.”
― Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“When Mrs. Kondo spoke to me in 1989, her daughter was forty-five years old and living far away on Hokkaido in northern Japan. The younger woman suffered the classic symptoms of fetal exposure: microcephaly and mental retardation. With her mother’s constant support, she had finished basic schooling, had married, and had borne two children of her own. The children showed no symptoms of abnormality; as in so many other cases, there was no evidence of a genetic effect. But Mrs. Kondo’s daughter cannot function as a normal mother in her state of limited mental capability. So she relates to her children much as a sister, and others bear the responsibility of parenthood.”
― James N. Yamazaki, Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician’s Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands

“Alf Lüdtke’s recent study shows on the basis of soldiers’ letters sent to their families back home, that in fact most people in the country ‘readily accepted’ Hitler, and they widely cheered the goals of ‘ “restoring” the grandeur of the Reich and “cleaning out” alleged “aliens” in politics and society’.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“She remembers how she ‘wanted only to see the good’ and the rest she ‘simply shoved aside’.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“Given this framework, he necessarily plays down Hitler’s role, and concludes among other things that ‘what Hitler and the Nazis actually did was to unshackle and thereby activate Germans’ pre-existing, pent-up antisemitism’. What he calls the ‘great success’ in persecuting the Jews, resulted ‘in the main’ from ‘the preexisting, demonological, racially based, eliminationist antisemitism of the German people, which Hitler essentially unleashed’.14”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“The Nazi effort to foster the relationship between the police and society took many forms, including a new public relations event, the ‘Day of the German Police’. It was held for the first time just before Christmas in 1934, and every year across Germany thereafter around that time to show the gentler and social side of the police, who collected money for the charity ‘Winter Help Works’.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“a police official in SS uniform, probably a member of the Gestapo, turned up in a senior high school class in the Stuttgart area. He was there to explain the background of ‘shootings “because of resistance” one could read about from time to time in the press’. He said simply, that while courts worked well when hard evidence could be found, the police had to act when there was insufficient evidence. They knew how to recognize guilt and were not bound by rules of evidence as were judges, so that the police could become the proverbial judge, jury, and executioner. Lest students worry unduly, they were assured that the police did not execute anyone without ‘previously thoroughly examining’ the case.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“Himmler encouraged Gestapo and Kripo to do their bit, and in 1936 a new ‘Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion’ was created to register all homosexuals investigated by police.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“According to the Himmler–Thierack agreements in 1942, the justice system was in the future mainly for Germans only.150 Their agreements went a long way in recognizing the validity of ‘police justice’. Execution orders for Poles, usually carried out as soon as possible and beyond appeal, were formulated in such a way as to make clear that the decision was made by the police, not the courts.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany