"John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war"
About this Quote
Asimov lands the gut punch with bureaucratic calm: “records, carefully preserved for a century,” then erased in a single night of strategic necessity. The sentence structure mimics archival order - catalogued, protected, handed down - only to be atomized by modern war’s indifference. By choosing John Dalton, a foundational figure in chemistry, Asimov isn’t mourning a celebrity relic; he’s mourning the infrastructure of knowledge itself, the patient accumulation that makes science possible.
The subtext is that war doesn’t just rearrange borders or bodies. It vandalizes time. Those records represent a century-long agreement between generations: we will carry forward what you discovered. Bombing breaks that pact. “It is not only the living who are killed” reframes casualties as more than a headcount, extending moral accounting to the dead and the unborn - the dead whose work is silenced again, the unborn whose future insights depend on what survives.
Context matters: Asimov, a scientist and a Cold War-era public intellectual, is writing from a world where industrialized conflict had proven it could erase cities and archives as efficiently as it erased soldiers. There’s also an implicit critique of the comforting story that science steadily “progresses.” Progress requires continuity, and continuity is fragile. The line works because it smuggles a cultural argument into a simple observation: when bombs fall, they don’t just destroy evidence; they destroy memory, and with it, part of what makes civilization more than a temporary truce between disasters.
The subtext is that war doesn’t just rearrange borders or bodies. It vandalizes time. Those records represent a century-long agreement between generations: we will carry forward what you discovered. Bombing breaks that pact. “It is not only the living who are killed” reframes casualties as more than a headcount, extending moral accounting to the dead and the unborn - the dead whose work is silenced again, the unborn whose future insights depend on what survives.
Context matters: Asimov, a scientist and a Cold War-era public intellectual, is writing from a world where industrialized conflict had proven it could erase cities and archives as efficiently as it erased soldiers. There’s also an implicit critique of the comforting story that science steadily “progresses.” Progress requires continuity, and continuity is fragile. The line works because it smuggles a cultural argument into a simple observation: when bombs fall, they don’t just destroy evidence; they destroy memory, and with it, part of what makes civilization more than a temporary truce between disasters.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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