A Quote by John Hersey

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.
It is deterrence that has prevented the use of nuclear weapons by all states that possess them since 1945.
As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.
Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.
I've always been fascinated by memory and I remember Jonah, when we first started dating, was working on something involving memory. It was early on in our relationship and I was like, damn it, I wanted to do a movie on memory. That was 'Memento.'
We kept everything: every major event that's happened to African-Americans since 1945, with 'Ebony' as a repository for all those photographs and as a voice for all that happened.
I repeat what I suggest in my book [ Strategie de la deception]. The first deterrence, nuclear deterrence, is presently being superseded by the second deterrence: a type of deterrence based on what I call 'the information bomb' associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies.
I've been around a long time, and I've been interested in memory for a long time. And one of my earlier interests in molecular biology of memory led me to define the switch that converts short term to long term memory.
We had been frightened of atomic weapons since 1945. In those days I became convinced - and remain convinced now - that, after Hitler, Truman was the greatest murderer in the world.
If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.
Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday.
You have to be reminded of a basic fact: intelligence belongs to the watching consciousness; memory belongs to the mind. Memory is one thing - memory is not intelligence. But the whole of humanity has been deceived for centuries and told indirectly that the memory is intelligence. Your schools, your colleges, your universities are not trying to find your intelligence; they are trying to find out who is capable of memorizing more. And now we know perfectly well that memory is a mechanical thing. A computer can have memory, but a computer cannot have intelligence.
My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.
As far as many statistical series that are related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory. The world of today is as different from the world I was born in as that world was from Julius Caesar s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.
I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.
I'd love a super human memory. My memory has never been good.
My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.
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