Quotes about diseases
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“This power, I tell them, shall change the face of the Earth. No more shall small groups, nor even single men, be able to rule multitudes through hunger in their bellies; for there shall no more be hunger nor want nor cold; and in time again there shall be no more disease, for as man learns to live in harmony with nature, instead of continually struggling against it, he will destroy the cause of disease.”

Desmond Leslie (1921–2001) British pilot, film maker, writer, and musician

Source: The Amazing Mr. Lutterworth (1958), p. 206

Hunger, Time, Learning, Nature

“The 1918 flu almost certainly didn’t originate in Spain. One popular theory for how it acquired the “Spanish” name posits that Spain was the only country where you could read about the disease. That’s because Spain remained neutral during World War I, and therefore its newspapers weren’t censoring any information deemed harmful to national morale. The disease was also rampaging through other countries, including France, Germany, Britain, and the United States, but those governments suppressed or downplayed reports on the extent of the damage. Accurate and timely information is vital to combating a pandemic, but still, some countries’ first impulses are to cover up the spread of the disease.”

Joshua Keating American journalist

Strongman Medicine: Suspicious Numbers and Brutal Quarantines (April 02, 2020)

Time, Reading, Country, War

“It's still unclear whether that takes place (that 2019-nCoV can spread before people show sings of being infected). But if it does, that might explain why the disease is spreading so quickly.”

Malik Peiris (1949) Sri Lankan scientist

Malik Peiris (2020) cited in " Number of Coronavirus Cases Passes SARS Outbreak https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/number-of-coronavirus-cases-passes-sars-outbreak/5265482.html" on Learning English, 29 January 2020.

Singing, People

“There's the spread of infectious disease, then there's the spread of panic. They have very different mechanisms.”

Amira Roess researcher

Amira Roess (2020) cited in " The Wuhan coronavirus seems to have a low fatality rate, and most patients make full recoveries. Experts reveal why it's causing panic anyway. https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-unnecessary-panic-experts-say-2020-1?IR=T" on Business Insider, 31 January 2020.

“This is the front line against terrible organisms. Like terrorism, you can’t fight it just within our borders. You’ve got to fight epidemic diseases where they emerge. [...] Either we help or hope we get lucky it isn’t an epidemic that travelers will catch or spread to our country.”

Tom Frieden (1960) American physician, President and Chief Executive Officer at Resolve to Save Lives

About the CDC downsizing its epidemic prevention. Quoted in CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/02/01/cdc-to-cut-by-80-percent-efforts-to-prevent-global-disease-outbreak/ (February 1, 2018) by Lena H. Sun, The Washington Post

Country, Hope, Help, Fight

“When you're treating diseases with drugs, you know there's one drug you take for cholesterol, a different class of drugs you take for high blood pressure, different class of drugs you take for diabetes, but, with diet, a plant-based diet affects all these diseases. One diet to kinda rule them all.”

Michael Greger (1972) American physician, author, and vegan health activist

Interview in the documentary-film What the Health by Kip Andersen (2017).

“We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here. And isn’t it refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?”

Kayleigh McEnany (1988) American political commentator and writer

Said at a press briefing on February 25, 2020, in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States (the United States had 15 confirmed cases at the time); quoted in “ 'We won't see coronavirus here' ... and other gems from Trump's new press secretary https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/08/kayleigh-mcenany-donald-trump-press-secretary-quotes” by David Smith and Emily Holden (April 8, 2020), from The Guardian.

“My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

Bill de Blasio (1961) American politician and mayor of New York City

Twitter, 11:35 AM · Apr 29, 2020 https://mobile.twitter.com/NYCMayor/status/1255309615883063297

Communication, Time

“In the 1970's and 1980's vaccines became, one might say, victims of their own success. They had been so effective in preventing infectious diseases that the public became much less alarmed at the threat of those diseases, and much more concerned with the risk of injury from the vaccines themselves.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, 562 U.S. 223 (2011), 226.
2010s

Success

“Our prime task now is to look after the environment. This will become the responsibility of every individual, politician, guru, saint and scientist. Our energies will be spent in making it healthy again. When that happens there will be less suffering, disease and poverty.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Share International Magazine

Making love, Suffering

“The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Twelve Types (1903) "Sir Walter Scott"

Dreams, Death

“The disease may not be too difficult to live with. I thought you said it was terminal?”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

“So I did. But then, everything is terminal, even health, even life itself. The only question is how long, and in what manner.”

I See a Man Sitting on a Chair, and the Chair Is Biting His Leg (p. 142)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

“It is these very conditions that facilitate the emergence of new infectious diseases and that also inflict horrific harms on animals — being kept in confined conditions and then butchered. Simply put, the coronavirus pandemic is a result of our gross maltreatment of animals.”

David Benatar (1966) South African philosopher

"Our Cruel Treatment of Animals Led to the Coronavirus" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opinion/animal-cruelty-coronavirus.html, The New York Times, April 13, 2020.

Animals

“Existential angst is often a disease of privilege. If you're actually being oppressed you have a struggle. You have something to fight for, and therefore a purpose, but for a lot of men their lack of purpose puts them in search of a struggle.”

Natalie Wynn ContraPoints

ContraPoints

Fight, Search, Men

“Much more seriously, in those traditional eco-systems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK. It would indeed be comforting to think that in some sense this ongoing animal holocaust doesn't matter too much. We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't.”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

1.9 The Taste of Depravity https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#taste The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Suffering, Nature, Animals, Thinking

“It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality in hospitals, especially in those of large crowded cities, is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated out of hospital would lead us to expect. The knowledge of this fact first induced me to examine into the influence exercised by hospital construction on the duration and death-rate of cases received into the wards; and it led me to lay before the Social Science Association a paper reprinted with the present title. Since the publication of the first edition of that paper, great advances have been made in the adoption of sound principles of hospital construction; and there are already a number of examples of new hospitals realizing all, or nearly all, the conditions required for the successful treatment of the sick and maimed poor.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Notes on Hospitals 3rd Edition (1863), Preface

Success, Knowledge, Exercises, Science

“We know with certainty that never could man have acquired the sciences and arts by himself guided only by his natural abilities and without the benefit of instruction. (This applies, e.g., to) medicine, the knowledge of the physiological temperaments, the diseases and their causes, in all their numerous varieties, and the invention of adequate treatment and cure of each of them by drugs or preparations, which could never have been actually tried out. For how could anyone test every prescription on every disease since this would take tens of thousands of years and necessitate the examination of every sick person in the world?”

Ibn Hazm (994–1064) Arab theologian

Regarding the role of experiment and observation, Ibn Hazm: Kitab al-fisal fi’l-milal wa-l-ahwa wa-l-nihal, 5 parts in two vols; Cairo, 1899 and 1903; Vol I, p. 72.

Personality, Art, Knowledge, Nature

“Study in one school of psychology came to what seemed a terrible conclusion. It was the school of Lombroso in Italy. He declared, and many others followed him, that the visions of the prophets, of the saints, of the seers, all their testimony to the existence of superphysical worlds, were the products of disordered brains, of diseased or over-strained nervous apparatus. He went further, and he declared that the manifestation known as genius was closely allied to insanity, that the brain of the genius and the brain of the madman were akin, until the phrase "genius is allied to madness," became the stock axiom of that school.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Essays and Addresses, Vol. III- Evolution and Occultism (1913)

School, Study, World, Madness

“Growthmania is the fatal disease of civilisation - it must be replaced by campaigns that make equity and well-being society’s goals - not consuming more junk.”

Paul R. Ehrlich (1932) American scientist and environmentalist

Source: Top scientists warn of 'ghastly future of mass extinction' and climate disruption https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/13/top-scientists-warn-of-ghastly-future-of-mass-extinction-and-climate-disruption-aoe. The Guardian (2021)

Making love

“I will work in the U.S. Senate to support a robust public health response so that we can defeat this virus, putting Georgia’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the lead, trusting medical expertise, doctors, and scientists to bring the tools to bear, the technology to bear, the ingenuity to bear, and the resources to bear necessary to stop the spread of this virus to defeat it and to get our daily lives back — and to rush direct economic relief to people who need help right now.”

Jon Ossoff (1987) American politician

Quoted in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Jolt: Raphael Warnock exults, Jon Ossoff claims victory, and Republicans wonder what happened, (6 January 2021)

Support, People, Help, Health

“[S]ince vegetal fat is identical chemically with animal fat, and vegetal protein with animal protein, since these substances are found abundantly in non-flesh products, and since the only other food substances used by man (starch and sugar) are not found except in plants and plant products, it may be asserted positively that from the standpoint of food-supply there is no reason why man should prey when he eats. The plant world contains all of the compounds necessary for human alimentation, it contains them abundantly, it contains them in forms of the highest delicacy and the greatest variety and economy, and it contains them in a much more prime condition than they are found in the diseased tissues of our mistreated servants.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), What Shall We Eat?, pp. 92–93

World, Animals, Food

“The truth is that the connection of Ireland with England has been full of trouble, and I fear there is no remedy. ... It is a chronic disease, and even if it is not to be cured we have proved in the past that we can get on with it and yet carry on our Empire to a vast pitch of prosperity. What has been done in the past can be done in the future. ... [D]o not let us attempt to cure it by a measure which will put this island into a condition which never during 700 years of our history has existed—which will hand over those who have had the courage to defend us to the maltreatment of their worst enemies, and which will establish at our very doors a post—a hostile post—which will be at the pleasure of any foreign power which may sometimes be hostile to us.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech to a banquet of the Merchant Taylors' Company, London (10 May 1886), quoted in The Times (11 May 1886), p. 12
1880s

Courage, Hostility, History, Past

“Comrades, I've voyaged long and far on sea and soul,
my eyes have seen disease, gods, ghosts, and men, and yet
in no land have I seen a more false, murderous siren
than that wind-headed, babbling, blind bitch-hound called Hope!”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Odysseus, Book X, line 892
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

God, Soul, Bitch, Hope

“We live in difficult times, marked by suffering and disease. We are still in the midst of a pandemic. Good Friday seems to continue, but we know that it will not be greater than the day of the resurrection. The cross, the suffering and the disease surrounding us must be lived in Christ, so that they become precious signs of grace and blessing.”

Lucian Mureșan (1931) Catholic cardinal

Romania: Card. Muresan (Greek Catholics), “may the Easter celebration be a new spring of hope embracing the whole of humanity” https://www.agensir.it/quotidiano/2021/4/29/romania-card-muresan-greek-catholics-may-the-easter-celebration-be-a-new-spring-of-hope-embracing-the-whole-of-humanity/ (29 April 2021)

Christ, Suffering, Time

“My dream when I was a child was to be a medical doctor so that I could help people suffering from diseases.”

Chiaki Mukai (1952) astronaut, medical doctor

Help, People, Dreams, Suffering

“It was at this time that the suggestion of studying medicine was first presented to me, by a lady friend. This friend finally died of a painful disease, the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her. She once said to me,'You are fond of study, have health and leisure; why not study medicine? If I could have been treated by a lady doctor, my worst sufferings would have been spared me.'”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

But I at once repudiated the suggestion as an impossible one, saying that I hated everything connected with the body, and could not bear the sight of a medical book. ... My favourite studies were history and metaphysics, and the very thought of dwelling on the physical structure of the body and its various ailments filled me with disgust. pp. 27–28 https://books.google.com/books?id=GHkIAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA27 Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895)

Pain, Study, Time, Suffering

“In carrying on the grand work of improving national health, extirpating loathsome disease, discovering and removing the causes of disease, the distinction must be carefully drawn between the object to be accomplished and the means by which it shall be attained. The object is a grand one; the method of accomplishing it must be equally so, i.e., it must be guided by moral principle.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

p. 757 https://books.google.com/books?id=85o2AAAAMAAJ&pg=757 Medicine and Morality (1881)

Health

“Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Health

“The aged are cared for until death; adults are employed in jobs that make full use of their abilities; and children are nourished, educated, and fostered;...orphans... the disabled and the diseased are all well taken care of....”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

The Analects, A Great Utopia (The World of Da-Tong)

Children, Age, Education, Death

“It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1950s, Russell–Einstein Manifesto (1955)

Universe, Fear, Death

“Many individual immune systems will be compromised by the hardships of the Long Emergency and disease will seize the opportunities presented, as it always has. […] Millions of human beings are going to die.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 182.

“Physicians and scientists will measure brain hormones—in ventricular fluid and elsewhere—will link these to specific diseases, and will devise space-age techniques to restock the mind's hormonal pantries. The only question is, When?'”

Richard Bergland neuroscientist

The Fabric of Mind (1985)

Age, Question

“Twenty years from now, the disease, 'presenile dementia' will be understood as well as diabetes is today.”

Richard Bergland neuroscientist

The Fabric of Mind (1985)

“Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn't, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Source: 27 February 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944

“There's literally no difference between a physician recognizing a disease from a "facial expression", and a little child pointing to something and saying "doggie."”

Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist

Source: Talks at Google - Nov 10, 2011

“To the oft-repeated question "If Jesus resurrected His physical body why is He not visible here among us?" we would say that Jesus overcame the sins that caused our original fall from the perfect body of the Adamic man to the diseased and dying body in which the race is now existing.”

Charles Fillmore (1854–1948) American mystic

Source: Mysteries Of John (1946)

Perfection, Question

“The day will come when all nations amidst which the Jews are dwelling will have to raise the question of their wholesale expulsion, a question which will be one of life or death, good health or chronic disease, peaceful existence or perpetual social fever.”

Franz Liszt (1811–1886) Hungarian romantic composer and virtuoso pianist

Source: As quoted in Col. E. N. Sanctuary’s Are These Things So?, p. 278.

Health, Peace, Question, Life

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100 percent mortality. So you can't live your life in fear.”

Richard Pyle (1967) American ichthyologist

Source: A dive into the reef's Twilight Zone https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_pyle_a_dive_into_the_reef_s_twilight_zone (February 2004)

Life, Fear

“Some of us in those days thought that we had actually identified a disease, which this clearly is not
To make people ill, to give them an illness, was the wrong thing
The fundamental problem is that the improvement that you see, which is not really great in clinical trials, is not maintained”

Frederick Wolfe (1936) researcher ORCID ID = 0000-0002-2801-6413

Source: "Drug Approved. Is Disease Real?" https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/health/14pain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, New York Times (14 January 2008)

People, Problem

“While we are currently confronted with the unprecedented difficulties caused by the spread of the coronavirus disease. . . I sincerely hope that we all work together hand in hand to overcome this difficult situation and continue to seek happiness of the people and world peace.”

Naruhito (1960) Emperor of Japan since 2019

Source: "Emperor Naruhito Makes Reference to Pandemic in First Speech in Half-Year" in Nippon https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d00612/ (1 October 2020)

Happiness, People, Sincerity, World

“It is not in the interest of the virus to kill the host because it (the virus) will die as well. Through their evolutionary process, viruses tend to accommodate the hosts to live in them. This means they want to cause mild diseases to propagate and that will ensure they can survive.”

Sazaly Abu Bakar researcher

Source: Sazaly Abu Bakar (2020) cited in " 'More studies needed on virus mutations' https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2020/03/572140/more-studies-needed-virus-mutations" on New Straits Times, 6 March 2020.

“But when the socialist and, even more, the syndicalist, began to propose his nostrums as medicine for the capitalist system, there appeared a diseased and corrupted form of socialism which found its neophytes in the oddest quarters.”

John Thomas Flynn (1882–1964) American journalist

Source: As We Go Marching (1944), p. 111

Appearance

“Fascism is a leftist product—a corrupt and diseased offshoot of leftist agitation.”

John Thomas Flynn (1882–1964) American journalist

Source: As We Go Marching (1944), p. 68

“The great disease of mankind is ignorance.
With knowledge you can grasp tight a belief: that you can be better, that the world can be better. With that, you can claim hope.
Hope is the eternal tool in the survival kit for mankind. We hope for a little luck, we hope for a better tomorrow, we hope — although it is an impossible hope — to somehow get out of this world alive.
And if we can't and don't, then it is enough to rejoice in our short time here and to remember how much we loved the view.”

Sidney Poitier (1927) American-born Bahamian actor, film director, author, and diplomat

Source: Life Beyond Measure (2008), twenty-third letter — The World I Leave You, p. 273

World, Time, Hope, Knowledge

“I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Letter to Lady Mosley (9 March 1966), quoted in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (1980), p. 638

“We are all naturally self-righteous. It is the family-disease of all the children of Adam.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Vol. II, Luke XVIII: 9–14, p. 259
Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: St. Luke (1858–1859)

Family, Children, Nature

“Disease's mess with you from the outside, but syndromes mess with you from the inside.”

Josh Duffy (1978) Subject of the documentary THE MAYOR

Film Quotes

“Customers are vermin. They infect companies with disease.”

Max Barry book Company

He says this with complete solemnity. “A company is a system. It is built to perform a relatively small set of actions over and over, as efficiently as possible. The enemy of systems is variation, and customers produce variation. They want special products. They have unique circumstances. They try to place orders with after-sales support and they direct complaints to sales. My proudest accomplishment, and I am being perfectly honest with you here, Mr. Jones, is not the Omega Management System and it associated revenue stream—which, by the way, is extremely lucrative. It is Zephyr. A customer-free company. Listen to that, Mr. Jones. A customer-free company. In the early days, you know, we tried to simulate customers. It was a disaster. Killed the whole project. When we started again, I cut every department that had external customers. It was like shooting a pack of rabid dogs. Now, I’m not claiming Zephyr Holdings is perfect. But we’re getting there, Mr. Jones. We’re getting there.”
Q4/1: October, p. 105
Company (2006)

“Can we live in a world of brotherhood and peace without disease and fear and oppression?”

Dolores Huerta (1930) American labor leader

1974 speech, in Voices of Multicultural America: Notable Speeches Delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans, 1790-1995 by Deborah Gillan Straub

Peace, World, Fear

“There are many ways to kill. One can stick a knife in one's stomach, deprive one of bread, fail to cure one of a disease, put one in a bad apartment, work one to death, drive one to suicide, take one to war, etc. Only a few of these are forbidden in our state.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

War, Way, Suicide, Death

“The only disease you have is your inability to see you have the power to heal yourself.”

Ralph Smart

Quotes about diseases page 10

Quotes about diseases
page 10