Quotes from Denise Kiernan

They fought to smile through the lines and the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government, an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world.

So the Next time September 17 rolls around, eat a hot dog, watch some fireworks, and celebrate Constitution Day - that fateful date in 1787 when thirty-nine sweaty men dressed in stockings signed their names to the United States Constitution.

A dictator decrees," she later wrote, "a president asks Congress for permission to organize.

Case in point: On one of their first dates, he brought her a box of Ivory Flakes soap. Who needs flowers? Roses fade, but flaky soap available from the PX lasted months. Having Ivory Flakes was a rarity in itself, and also saved her valuable time—one less line to stand in, only to find that the grocer was out. Again. That was romance, as far as Colleen was concerned. Maybe this guy was a keeper after all.

We don't matriculate engineering as a major for females,

Despite their marriage license and four children, black couples were not permitted to live as man and wife on the Reservation.

The "hillbilly" girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had...The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls...had been trained like soldiers. Do what you're told. Don't ask why.

It was a time of repurposing. "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without," was the motto of the time.

Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time–just under three years–is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower, and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went into the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?

On occasion, people who tried to write family members living at Site X by addressing the letters to "Oak Ridge" got those letters returned to sender with a note reading simply: "There is no such place as Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Conformity," she wrote, "is the bane of middle class communities.

Elbridge Gerry, the fifth vice president of the United States—under President James Madison—and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. (Due to his incessant fiddling with voter districts in Massachusetts to shape them in his favor, Elbridge Gerry infamously inspired the term "gerrymandering.")

Q: How many people are working in Oak Ridge? A: About half of them.

She deemed Fermi's work inconclusive, and in late 1934, she published her views on Fermi's findings in an article titled "Über Das Element 93" (On Element 93), in which she proposed an idea that seemed unrealistic

I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there'll be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we forge too deeply into the planet there will be a reckoning—who knows?

Forget jumping grains of sand—that was enough energy to displace a chunk of desert.

So ended a day many had dreaded," Natalie wrote in her diary on Christmas Day, "but by doing and thinking of others, we had forgotten self.

nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. "Nothing any good isn't hard.

Mrs. Gerry was an outstanding figure here," the paper noted, "not because she tried to be, but because she couldn't help being.

Half the pleasure in life comes from learning to choose between things.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.

The rich sought to conquer one another on battlefields of architectural grandeur. Society fought wars in ballrooms and twinkling parlors, wielding the most haute of designers and decor as their weapons of choice, Italian marble beneath their feet.

The most ambitious war project in military history rested squarely on the shoulders of tens of thousands of ordinary people, many of them young women.

May your joys be as many as the sands of the sea,