Kenzaburō Ōe

“Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.”

“The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.”

“The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.”

“We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.”

“For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic bomb was dropped, did not have the movable type for 'atomic bomb' or 'radioactivity'. The silence continued so long because the U.S. Army Surgeons Investigation Team in the fall of 1945 had issued a mistaken statement: all people expected to die from the radiation effects of the atomic bomb had by then already died; accordingly, no further cases of physiological effects due to residual radiation would be acknowledged.”

“Peril-ridden and fragile, the imperfect human body, what a shameful thing it was!”