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"What I had said in the morning was that this is what we know has happened, but there has been no significant off-site release. Only to find out moments later that, in fact, there had been an off-site release. I still haven't gotten over that."
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"In fact I am quite snappy and irritable, and I don't know if I'd like to make myself worse in that respect."

"Whoever wishes to keep a secret must hide the fact that he possesses one."

"Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd."

"Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts."

"What keeps us from abandoning ourselves entirely to one vice, often, is the fact that we have several."
Explore more quotes by William Scranton

"All of the information that we were getting up to that time from the NRC people, from our people who knew something about nuclear power, was that the breach of the core was not a likelihood to happen."

"When I started walking and I looked down and I saw on the floor this water, which looked like, you know, water in your basement except it happened to be in the auxiliary building of a nuclear power plant."

"What I had said in the morning was that this is what we know has happened, but there has been no significant off-site release. Only to find out moments later that, in fact, there had been an off-site release. I still haven't gotten over that."

"I was scheduled to give my first official press conference that morning anyway, 'cause I was chairman of the Governors Energy Council and I was making a press conference with regard to energy policy."

"And at ten, or whatever time, in the morning we had the press conference, what we knew is there had been an incident at Three Mile Island, that it was shut down, that there was water that had escaped but it was contained."

"But the issue became, how long do you keep the press waiting so that you can gather more information?"

"There are allowable limits for radiation going - I mean there's radiation all around us. There's radiation from your television set. There's radiation from your computer. There's radiation actually occurring in the ground."

"You need a graphic understanding of a situation to make a complete judgment and we didn't have that."

"The first one, obviously, was walking into my office at eight o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, and being told there was a telephone call saying that there was an incident at Three Mile Island, and that it had shut down and that beyond that we didn't know."

"And I remember walking in there and, I must say, I was quite unnerved the closer I got to it."
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