Quotes about diseases
page 4

“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rockings of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

People, Thinking, Suffering

“1963 is when prayer and Bible reading was taken out of the American school system. Anybody remember that? Madalyn Murray O’Hair? Her son, by the way, became a preacher. His mom used him to get prayer taken out. But in 1963, sexually transmitted diseases began to climb. This is for kids 10 to 14 years of age. 1963 is when divorce rates began to go up. By the way, premarital sex and divorce go hand and hand. If you don’t trust 'em before you’re married, you won’t trust 'em after you’re married. 1963 is when violent crimes began to increase. There’s been nearly a 1000% increase in violent crimes. 1963 is when unwed birthrates began to incline. 100% increase for girls 10 to 14. By the way, pregnancies have increased 553%. SAT scores have dropped off incredibly since 1963. 1963 is when we saw an incredible rise of married couples living together in adultery. Teen suicide rate has gone crazy.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Age, School, Sex, Way

“This is what you should do: Go to your record store and buy all the GG ALLIN recordings you can find. If they dont have any in stock, tell them to order some. If they refuse, then do what you have to do. Call radio stations and demand GG Allin. Spray paint "GG ALLIN" everywhere. Make them aware that the disease and the Scumfuc tradition is still spreading. Write "GG ALLIN" on all your dollar bills. Any bills you have. People do not throw money away, so it would be a free way to get the message out. You must do it every day of your life. We must live for the Rock 'N' Roll underground. It CAN be dark and dangerous again. It CAN be threatning to our society as it was meant to be. IT MUST BE UNCOMPROMISING. And with me as your leader, it will happen. I am ready to lead you, my allies, into the real Rock 'N' Roll underground. Let's get started.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin: GG Allin Mission Statement http://ggallinonline.com/mission.php, GG Allin Online.com, 1991. GG Allin Mission Statement read March 1, 2010.

Life, Money, People, Way

“Jealousy is a disease; love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often confuses one for the other, or assumes the greater the love, the greater the jealousy. In fact they are almost incompatible; both at once produce unbearable turmoil.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

"Jubal Harshaw" in the first edition (1961); this is another line not in the "Uncut" edition of 1991 based on his original manuscripts, because this was one of the lines that Heinlein added, rather than trimmed down, during the editing process of the first edition.
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961; 1991)

Love, Jealousy

“New diseases like syphilis seemed to call for new and "stronger" medicines; and this became one of the stock arguments for resort to the Paracelsian chemical pharmacopeia and mystical medical philosophy. With every fundamental of medicine thus called into question, the only logical recourse was to observe results of cures administered in accordance with the old Galenic as against the new Paracelsian theories, and then to choose whichever worked better. The swift development of European medical practice to levels of skill exceeding all other civilized traditions resulted.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.6.

Question

“To state the obvious: vegetarians live longer than meat eaters simply and solely because we do not consume the filthy, fatty, disease-ridden, decaying flesh of animals.”

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

Source: No More Bull! (2005), Ch. 5: Message for My Meat-Eating Friends, p. 61

Animals

“Diseases, a paralysis of the left side, a monstrous right hand tremor strengthened by the efforts by the needle [for engraving] and caused by previous excesses with alcohol, prevent me from doing any calligraphic craftsmanship. A constant effort to achieve my goal - I've never reached the degree hoped - has exacerbated my life, and every job has ended with the depression of having to go on with this life.”

Lovis Corinth (1858–1925) German painter

Quote, 1923; in Lovis Corinth, Selbstbiographie, L. Corinth; Hirzel, Leipzig, 1926, p. 194; as quoted in: German Artists' Writings in the XX Century - Lovis Corinth, Autobiographic Writings. Part two http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2014/10/german-artists-writings-in-xx-century.html

Life, Alcohol, Hope, Effort

“Ding Gou’er was born in 1941 and married in 1965. It was garden variety marriage, with husband and wife getting along well enough, and producing one child, a darling little boy. He had a mistress who was sometimes adorable and sometimes downright spooky. Sometimes she was like the sun, at other times he moon. Sometimes she was a seductive feline, at other times a mad dog. The idea of divorcing his wife appealed to him, but not enough to actually go through with it. Staying with his mistress was tempting, but not enough to actually do it. Anytime he took sick, he fantasized the onset of cancer, yet was terrified by the thought of the disease; he loved life dearly, and was tired to death of it. He had trouble being decisive. He often stuck the muzzle of his pistol against his temple, then brought it back down; another frequent site of this game was his chest, specifically the area over his heart. One thing and one thing only pleased him without exception or diminution: investigating and solving criminal cases.”

Mo Yan book The Republic of Wine

Source: The Republic of Wine (1992), Chapter I, Section 1

Love, Life, Death, Marriage

“Great writers arrive among us like new diseases – threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.”

Craig Raine (1944) Poet

The Independent on Sunday, November 18, 1990.

“Aids is Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. I don't believe it's a sensible thing to ask: 'Does a virus cause a syndrome?' It can't. A virus will cause a disease. The syndrome is a group of diseases as a result of immune deficiency. As a result of immune deficiency you suffer various diseases.”

Thabo Mbeki (1942) South African politician, President of South Africa

Source: August 2000, addressing South African Parliament http://www.mg.co.za/articledirect.aspx?articleid=173678&area=%2farchives%2farchives__online_edition%2f http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/12/aids.chrismcgreal.

Suffering

“But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.”

William Bradford (1590–1657) English Separatist leader in Leiden, Holland and in Plymouth Colony (1590-1657)

Ch. 4.

Death, God, Dead

“The way some of these politicians talk about homosexuality is very insulting. They treat it like it's a disease, like being gay is contagious. Being gay is not contagious. And if you think that it is, YOU'RE GAY.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Tours and CDs, Assassin CD

Way, Thinking

“In the summer of 1930 my academic future, however, was not uppermost in my mind. I had been stricken by an acute attack of a disease which at regular intervals afflicts all mathematicians and, for that matter, all scientists: I became obsessed by a problem.”

Mark Kac (1914–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Prologue, How I Became a Mathematician, p. 1.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)

Problem, Affliction, Future, Summer

“The New England Journal of Medicine has recently reported that speaking about one’s faults creates abnormalities in the pulsations of our heart. Tiny abnormalities? No. Abnormalities as great as those produced by riding a stationary bicycle to the point of either exhaustion or chest pain. Perhaps [the criticisms men exchange beginning with adolescence], then, contribute to men being four times more likely than women to suffer heart disease before age fifty. In essence, our sons might be practicing heart-disease training.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 186.

Women, Men, Pain, Age

“In this Age, work purifies and is the best spiritual practice (…) Work is so good that it prevents disease and gives you mental ease. Work is such a good thing that it relieves man of all ailments.”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India

Karma yoga
Source: The Teachings of Babaji, 5 April 1982.

Age

“My name is Marshall Mathers, I'm an alcoholic (Hi Marshall), I have a disease and they don't know what to call it.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Just Don't Give A Fuck" (Track 15).
1990s, The Slim Shady LP (1999)

Alcohol

“Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

On the Educational Value of the Medical Society (1903)

Life, Law

“What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

George Dennison Prentice http://www.picturehistory.com/product/id/4820, in Prenticeana (1860) Misattributed

Health

“The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Pensées (1937).

Thinking

“In his defense of Ambassador John Bolton and repudiation of the United Nations and the Third World, referring to the Third World, "That latter group includes a huge number of so-called nations, little more than spots on the map that would get invaded, taken over, subsumed, eliminated, except no-one wants to get stuck with their problems of poverty, disease and corruption."”

John Gibson (media host) (1946) American radio talk show host

http://www.newshounds.us/2005/04/06/john_gibson_oozes_hate_and_contempt_for_third_world_nations_un.php

World, Problem

“A holy man will follow after purity of heart. He will dread all filthiness and uncleanness of spirit, and seek to avoid all things that might draw him into it. He knows his own heart is like tinder, and will diligently keep clear of the sparks of temptation. Who shall dare to talk of strength when David can fall? There is many a hint to be gleaned from the ceremonial law. Under it the man who only touched a bone or a dead body or a grave or a diseased person became at once unclean in the sight of God.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots (first published 1879).

God, Law, Heart, Drawing

“Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

Source: "On Truth," 1934, p. 19 (1961 edition)

Truth, Science

“All hail, M. P.! from whose infernal brain
Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train;
At whose command "grim women" throng in crowds,
And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds,
With "small gray men," "wild yagers," and what not,
To crown with honour thee and Walter Scott;
Again all hail! if tales like thine may please,
St. Luke alone can vanquish the disease;
Even Satan's self with thee might dread to dwell,
And in thy skull discern a deeper hell.”

Matthew Lewis (writer) (1775–1818) English novelist and dramatist

Lord Byron English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), line 273.
Criticism

Women, Men, Hell, Water

“The control and prevention of diseases and epidemics should go beyond boundaries.”

Chen Shih-chung politician

Chen Shih-chung (2017) cited in " No WHA invite, but Taiwan's going anyway http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2017/05/10/497115/No-WHA.htm" on The China Post, 10 May 2017

“Disease can be defeated, and people with AIDS refuse to be defeated.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2014, U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit Spousal Program (August 2014)

People

“Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Planning for Wildlife" [1941]; Published in For the Health of the Land, J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle (eds.), 1999, p. 197.
1940s

People, Understanding, Study, Science

“Medicine heals diseases of the body, wisdom frees the soul from passions.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 149
Variant: Medicine cures the diseases of the body; wisdom, on the other hand, relieves the soul of its sufferings.

Wisdom, Soul, Passion

“This test has much in common with the other great challenges that are defining this young century -- from weapons proliferation, to the spread of disease, to transnational terrorism. These are truly global problems, and no one nation, no matter how much power or political will it possesses, can succeed alone. We all need partners, and we all need to work in concert.”

Condoleezza Rice (1954) American Republican politician; U.S. Secretary of State; political scientist

US Department of State http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2007/09/92893.htm, September 28, 2007.

Problem

“No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 76

Imagination

“Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter IX: The Leech

Heart

“The idea that ancient equal years of accumulated wisdom is a fallacy. […] In medicine, 'ancient' also means developed before we understood the causes of disease, before germ theory. It was based on ignorance then and age makes it no truer. We misguidedly look back to a golden age that never was; ours is the golden age of safe tested medicine, effective beyond placebo, in which we've cut infant mortality and conquered diseases, then forgotten they existed.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Enemies of Reason, "The Irrational Health Service"
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

Wisdom, Age, Idea

“Said the great Teacher, “If your son asks for bread, will you give him a stone?” The body calls for bread, for life-giving food, but how often we supply, instead, such indigestible, unwholesome rubbish as pickles, green olives, fried foods, and various abominable mixtures which bring into the body death rather than life. How often, too, the voice which calls for pure, life-giving water is insanely answered by such disease-producing drinks as beer, whisky, wine, tea, or coffee, and the like.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, p. 58

Life, Death, Food, Coffee

“I may say that Buddhism does indeed come closer in essence to reality than other religions. However, the Buddhist either have not gone far enough, or have gone too far, according to your viewpoint. If they have gone too far, then they have been so concerned with inner reality that they have become too tolerant of physical disease and disasters. If they have no gone far enough, then they have not followed through sufficiently so that these physical disasters could truly be suffered without pain.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 191
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 4

Pain, Religion, Reality, Suffering

“The news is disease in disguise pretending to be information.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

"Do I Have To?"
Degrees: Thought Capsules and Micro Tales (1989)

“The confusion of mind you dub honor is a disease.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 282

“People living with AIDS should not be dying from preventable and treatable diseases.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2014, U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit Spousal Program (August 2014)

People

“It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Quarantine Speech (1937)

Health, World, Communication

“Build me a tomb for when I die, build it 50,000 feet into the sky… Build me a boat I want to discover America, build me a boat to take me to the edge of the seven seas, build me a boat and you can sail along with me, we’ll spread our money, power, religion and disease. …Who are they to say that we own nothing and our lives have gone astray?”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Wood and Nails"
Blue Walls and The Big Sky (1995)

Money, Religion, Sea

“The diseases which are hard to cure in neighborhoods… are catarrh, hoarseness, coughs, pleurisy, consumption, spitting of blood, and all others that are cured not by lowering the system but by building it up. They are hard to cure, first, because they are originally due to chills; secondly, because the patient's system being already exhausted by disease, the air there, which is in constant agitation owing to winds and therefore deteriorated, takes all the sap of life out of their diseased bodies and leaves them more meager every day. On the other hand, a mild, thick air, without drafts and not constantly blowing back and forth, builds up their frames by its unwavering steadiness, and so strengthens and restores people who are afflicted with these diseases.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VI, Sec. 3

Life, People, Affliction

“There is no single cause for any disturbance of the total organism, whether this be expressed as a behavior pattern often labeled psychiatric entity, or a physical disturbance classified as a somatic disease.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Grinker and Robbins (1954) cited in: Eugene Frederick Hahn (1956) Stuttering: significant theories and therapies. p. 17

Behavior

“Hegelism is like a mental disease—you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you've got it.”

Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist

Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926), p.22

“What is anarchism, anyway? Anarchism is the doctrine (as theoretician Benjamin R. Tucker has stated it) that the State should be abolished, and that all the affairs of men should be handled by individuals or voluntary associations. Anarchism is thus the opposition to and denial of the legitimacy of a positive belief; namely, that the State is moral and necessary. It is alleged that anarchism is a need of man only in the sense that the absence of a specific disease is a need of man, or a precondition of health.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

"The Epistemological Status of the Issue,” 1971-72

Men, Health, Sense

“Evil reports of a churlish wilderness, a pitiless climate, disease, misery, and death, had heralded the arrival of De Monts. The outlay had been great, the returns small; and when he reached Paris, he found his friends cold, his enemies active and keen.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. II, Ch. 4 Lescarbot and Champlain
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Death, Evil

“I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them.
Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Response when he was asked whether he believed in God, at his interview with the Rolling Stone Magazine http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140313#ixzz367A061i0. March 27, 2014. The Rolling Stone Interview (2014)

Life, God, People, World

“Drug-use is a terminal disease.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton (1981). Gone Way Down: Teenage Drug-Use is a Disease, American Studies Press, Tampa, FL, pg 62.
On Teenage Drug Use

“We can have the final word on hate, neglect, disease and all the other insidious characters that still script their way into our stories…for now, but not forever.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

“It’s a Wrap”, message posted on ourchart.com (16 October 2008) http://www.jennifer-beals.com/media/speeches/oc.html#wrap.

Hate, Way

“The nation which is satisfied is lost. The nation which is not progressive is retrograding. "Rest and be thankful" is a motto which spells decay. The new world seems to possess more of this quality in its crude state, at any rate, than the old. In individuals it sometimes seems to be carried to excess. I do not by this mean the revolutions which periodically ravage the Southern and Central American Republics. I think more of the restless enterprise of the United States, with the devouring anxiety to improve existing machinery and existing methods, and the apparent impossibility of accumulating any fortune, however gigantic, which shall satisfy or be sufficient to allow of leisure and repose. There the disdain of finality, the anxiety for improving on the best seems almost a disease; but in Great Britain we can afford to catch the complaint, at any rate in a mitigated form, and give in exchange some of our own self-complacency, for complacency is a fatal gift. "What was good enough for my father is good enough for me" is a treasured English axiom which, if strictly carried out, would have kept us to wooden ploughs and water clocks. In these days we need to be inoculated with some of the nervous energy of the Americans.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Address as President of the Birmingham and Midland Institute (15 October, 1901).
'Lord Rosebery On National Culture', The Times (16 October, 1901), p. 4.

World, Thinking, Water

“When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes — disease and death and the rotting of flesh.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

"Down the River", p. 147
Desert Solitaire (1968)

Death, Women, Tree

“Pythagoras said that medicine is the most godlike of arts. But if the most godlike, it should tend to the soul as well as the body, or else a living thing must be unhealthy, being diseased in its higher part.”

Apollonius of Tyana (15–100) Ancient Greek philosopher

to Crito, Epp. Apoll. 23
Letters

Art, Soul, Parting

“True dragons are Danish and speak Danish, a tongue that the Danes themselves describe as less a language than a throat disease. To attract a dragon, one chains a naked maiden to a rock. The maiden must be chained to the rock in such a way that every part of her is visible to the dragon. Many famous paintings demonstrate the technique; Ingres’s Angelica Saved by Ruggiero is an example. After the dragon has inspected your maiden to its heart’s content, you issue one of the conventional formal challenges, in Danish—’Jeg udfordre dig til ridderlig camp’ is the way one usually puts it—and then the fight begins.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

Source: The King (1990), p. 39.

Way, Heart, Fight, Parting

“Contempt for science could perhaps depend on the fact that, science hasn’t been able to solve any of our basic problems, for example the environmental pollution or the problems with HIV and AIDS. This is the worst disease of our time, and scientists are lost. I believe that many people are disappointed with science when the answers we need are not delivered.”

Björn Ulvaeus (1945) Swedish musician

Björn Ulvaeus Speaks on Humanism, 14 July 2006

People, Disappointment, Problem, Science

“There is an inborn tendency to be Free. Every being is struggling to be Free. No one wants bondage. No one wants misery. The very idea of disease and death is appalling to all. Still, a being thinks that it will be happy by sense-pleasures. Can these sense-pleasures make one happy? No. Any amount of sense-pleasures will not make one really happy. Sense-pleasures will bring momentary satisfaction and then make one unhappy. Then comes the question: Where does this real happiness lie? It lies in knowing the True Nature. To know your True Nature, you have to control your mind. In order to control your mind, you have to live a true life. You must be a man of good character. That is why all the Scriptures ask their followers to be good, kind, gentle, noble, charitable, truthful, etc. In fact, moral and ethical codes of good conduct are the starting points of all Religions. They start with moral and ethical codes and end with God-realization or Self-realization.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

The Essence of Life (1980), also in Minor Works II (2001), p. 131f

Life, Death, God, Pleasure

“The night is this city’s single resource. Well, that and disease.”

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Relatives (1973)., Chapter 14 (p. 217).

Night

“I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm… in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”

Daniel Berrigan (1921–2016) American Catholic priest, peace activist, and poet

No Bars to Manhood (1971), p. 49.

Love, Life, Death, Men

“Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings—patient or impatient, but dyings—have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is “taught to live” by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Poetry in War and Peace”, p. 129
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Death, Stupidity, Suffering

“The Catholic Church has a lot of sins on the conscience regarding the health prevention. I still have a copy of a church magazine from 1905 that condemns the use of vaccines. Until recently, the Church believed that every illness is the result of God's decision. So if the disease attacked, then it was necessary to accept it with dignity – as the judgment of the Supreme.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Mazurek, Maria (7 July 2017): Cudowna armia, która broni naszego ciała http://plus.gazetakrakowska.pl/magazyn/a/cudowna-armia-ktora-broni-naszego-ciala,12271571. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

God, Health, Decision

“People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most uninteresting things in their lives.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Love, People

“The best way to cure this mortal disease of individualism must be to provide that there shall never exist any confident expectation either that prices generally are going to fall or that they are going to rise; and also that there shall be no serious risk that a movement, if it does occur, will be a big one. If, unexpectedly and accidentally, a moderate movement were to occur, wealth, though it might be redistributed, would not be diminished thereby.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), Social Consequences of Changes in The Value of Money (1923)

Way, Confidence, Wealth

“Only in this age and generation, is it at last possible to impart the laws of magnetic healing, and to indicate the causes of those diseases - originating in the three inner bodies - which today devastate the human frame, cause endless suffering and pain, and usher man through the portal which leads to the world of bodiless existence. Only today is man at the point in the evolution of his consciousness where he can begin to realise the power of the subjective worlds, and the new and vast science of psychology is his response to this growing interest.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Esoteric Healing (1953), p. 1

Pain, Age, World, Law

“Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

Bettencourt, L. M., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C., & West, G. B. (2007). " Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.long." Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 104(17), 7301–7306. 2000s

People, History, Wealth

“I am not saying that the events in one life cause the events in another, but that there is an overall pattern - a bank of probable events - and that in each life each individual chooses those that suit his or her overall private purposes. Yet those lives will be connected. An individual may have a serious illness in one life. That event may turn up as one uncomfortable nightmare in another existence. In still another life, the individual might have a dear friend who suffers from the same disease. In still another existence the individual might decide to be a doctor, to seek a cause and a cure for the same disease.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 229

Life, Suffering

“If that hideousness came here, it wouldn't be any more hideous for the animals — they are all bound for a ghastly death anyway. But it would wake up consumers. … I openly hope it [hoof and mouth disease] comes here. It will bring economic harm only for those who profit from giving people heart attacks and giving animals a concentration camp-like existence. It would be good for animals, good for human health and good for the environment.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

ABC News interview, 2001 April 2

Death, People, Health, Hope

“.. At the end of the month I should like to go to the hospital at St. Remy or another institution of this kind. What comforts me a little, is that I am beginning to consider madness as a disease like any other and accept the thing as such, whereas during the crises themselves, I thought that everything I imagined was real... After all... I have perhaps still some almost normal years in front of me.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, France, 21 April 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 585), p 25 1880s, 1889

Imagination, Madness

“Reports to the Surgeon General… represent the final word upon the efficient and devoted sense of responsibility of our people in this obligation to our fellow citizens. Overwhelmingly they confirm the fact that the general mortality rate, infant mortality rate, epidemics, the disease rate—are less than in normal times. There is but one explanation. That is, that through an aroused sense of public responsibility, those in destitution and their children are receiving actually more adequate care than even in normal times.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

The Hoover Policies (1937)

Children, People, Sense, Time

“When you analyse it carefully, it is about a family’s ability to stay together and have time together. We all know, with our fractured lives in this place, how difficult it becomes when we as human beings cannot spend time with one another. However, the problem is that these industrial relations laws now set that disease in place right across the nation in every workplace, in every part of the country. What I fear most of all is the ultimate impact of this on the fabric of Australian family life.”

Kevin Rudd (1957) Australian politician, 26th Prime Minister of Australia

Rudd's first speech as Labor leader
Speaking of the Workchoices Act introduced by the Howard government in March 2006.
2006

Life, Fear, Family, Law

“Today we are talking not just about warring sides but about humanity at large. Any reasonable man finds it hard to believe that while hunger, diseases, social inequality, economic underdevelopment and illiteracy are in existence, hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted to feed the insatiable monster — the arms race.”

Yevgeniy Chazov (1929) Russian physician

Tragedy and Triumph of Reason (1985)

Hunger, War

“Scum, nazi, filth, trash, garbage, maggots. We're all ruled by little chicken-neck nellies, going "Kill everybody! I get off when I talk about cutting people's power off! I'm a nelly!" RAARGH! Just simpering control freaks, in big nerd packs, taking everything over, ruling everything. Becoming police officers with weapons, tasering us for fun. I've had it with control freaks and scum! You people are cancer! Ugh! Alright, I'm not in a good mood now. I start thinking about Bill Gates, that little chicken-neck, hopping around, little murdering eugenicist. You know how he walks, like a demonic elf. "I'm Bill Gates! I'm gonna shoot you up with something that's gonna kill you deader than a hammer. How's a 30 year death from gut disease sound, African children? Roll up the sleeves! I'm a little chicken-neck bastard, and nobody's got the will to see what I am!"”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

Alex's Bill Gates Chicken-Neck Bastard 'Rant' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg-5WgcMV_o, September 2011.

Death, Children, People, Mood

“[Medical] science was indeed powerful, but its self-understanding left much to be desired. It knew the human parts in ever-finer detail, but it concerned itself little with the human whole. … The art of healing does not inquire into what health is, or how to get and keep it: The word "health" does not occur in the index of the leading textbooks of medicine. To judge from the way we measure medical progress, largely in terms of mortality statistics and defeats of deadly diseases, one gets the unsettling impression that the tacit goal of medicine is not health but rather bodily immortality, with every death today regarded as a tragedy that future medical research will prevent.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Death, Health, Art, Way

“He quickly lowered his eyes to his knees again, to conceal the pain in them, to conceal his broken faith in the innate goodness of men, the profound despair of realization that reason might not after all triumph over ignorance.
“Perhaps,” he murmured aloud, “To believe in the inevitable triumph of rationality might, in itself, be no more than another expression of those same superstitions which we deplore in the ignorant. It is apparently an occupational disease, perhaps a fatal one, for the scientist to be too sanguine about eventual rule by reason. There is so little evidence…””

Mark Clifton book They'd Rather Be Right

Source: They'd Rather Be Right (1954), p. 16.

Men, Pain, Faith, Despair

“This leads me of course to at least mention here the cruel methods used in the slaughtering of animals and fowls for human consumption. The creatures are treated as if they possessed no feeling or consciousness of their own - and such attitudes show a most unfortunate misreading of natural events. As a direct result, at least as many diseases develop through such procedures as would exist in a highly primitive society with unsanitary conditions.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 197

Feeling, Nature, Animals

“Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride's disease.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Crazy Salad Plus Nine (1984)

Thinking, Personality

“Plato in his 'Laws,' remarks that 'Atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of the understanding.' This just opinion, if applied to mere sensualists, who disbelieve in God because his holiness is a restraint upon their infamous passions, has since been applied to the pure thinkers like Spinoza, to whom it is an insult and an outrage. Let us see how little such a remark is applicable to those who thoughtfully pause before adopting a creed which, however dictated by a feeling of piety, is far less reverential than thoughtful silence.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

Source: The Limits of Atheism: Or, Why Should Sceptics be Outlaws? 1874, p. 13

God, Law, Error, Feeling

“We wrongly consider the Shaikh as someone who can remove our distress, take our worries away and fulfil our needs. We forget that those personalities who are granted such offices have to undergo more worldly trials than us commoners; they face more diseases and encounter greater difficulties than others. This is the Sunnah of the holy Prophet-saws who said, “I had to face more troubles than any other Prophet.””

Ameer Muhammad Akram Awan (1934–2017) Pakistani Sufi leader

Personality, Forgetting

“Ten thousand people a day die of starvation, according to a United Nations survey. Thousands more die from disease daily: we have earth-quakes, floods. droughts and pestilence. These are only a few of the evidences which show us that something is drastically wrong with our relationship with our creator. All of humanity’s problems stem from rebellion to The Word of God. Since mans rejection of God we have lived in this fallen state, where our weather patterns are chaotic, animals devour each other, our crops are diseased, and multitudes are suffering and dying from sickness and disease. These are stark reminders that what The Word of God says is true.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

God, People, Problem, Suffering

“We seem to assume that if only someone could find the cure for our disease, some new plan, we should at once see that it was the cure and apply it. We ask for leaders and leadership. But if the right course, which the leader indicates, is regarded by the multitudes sincerely as the wrong one, they will declare that he is no leader but a misleader. Inevitably in a democracy the leader is he who expresses existing convictions in the most vivid way, who possesses, as someone puts it, "the common mind to an uncommon degree."”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Way, Democracy, Sincerity

“It may come as a surprise to many people that the human genome contains human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) that are linked to cancer, autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, and more. Gene editing offers a new hope to eradicating many deadly hereditary diseases.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

People, Hope

“"Have you come, then, to rescue me?"
He laughed and said, "from what, 'Colleen'?"
You dried and dressed most willingly.
You corseted, and caught the dread disease
by which one comes to know such peace."”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Colleen
Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band (2007)

Peace

“Among today's Italians, when treading upon Haile Selassie's memory, the sense of guilt and shame is such that they react by seeing only his positive traits: the merits of his past actions. His portrayals always brim with excessive deferance, unwarranted admiration and delusion. They go on and on about his priestly composure, his regal dignity, his great intelligence and his generosity towards former adversaries. They never explain who this sovereign, who we made into a victim, really was. They never dare tell us if he was something more, or less, than a victim. For example, that he was an old man hardened in principles which were centuries out of date; that he was the absolute ruler of a nation which has never heard the words rights and democracy, which lives in a near prehistoric fashion in the suburbs, opressed by hunger, disease, ignorance and the squallor of a feudal regime which even we did not experience during the darkest years of the Medieval period.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

On Haile Selassie, (June 1972), as quoted in Intervista con la Storia (sixth edition, 2011) p. 509
Intervista con la Storia

Hunger, Democracy, Intelligence, Fashion

“Disease of the home and of the life comes about in the same way as that of the body.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 170
Variant: Disease occurs in a household, or in a life, just as it does in a body.

Life, Way, Home

“We define successful aging as including three main components: low probability of disease and disease-related disability, high cognitive and physical functional capacity, and active engagement with life.”

Robert L. Kahn (1918–2019) American psychologist

Rowe, John W., and Robert L. Kahn. " Successful aging http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/4/433.full.pdf." The gerontologist 37.4 (1997): 433-440.

Life, Age, Success

“It may also strike you, my readers, as quite shocking when I tell you that there is no such thing, basically, as disease. There are instead only processes. What you think of disease is instead the result of an exaggeration or overextension of perfectly normal body processes. You are not attacked by viruses, for instance, for all kinds of viruses exist normally in the body. There are no KILLER viruses, then but viruses that go beyond their usual bounds.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 71

Thinking

“Overcoming hopelessness requires addressing its causes: poverty, disease, and ignorance. Challenging these conditions is in the interest of every nation in this chamber. And democracies are particularly well-positioned to carry out this work. Because we have experience responding to the needs of our own people, we're natural partners in helping other nations respond to the needs of theirs. Together, we must commit our resources and efforts to advancing education and health and prosperity.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

People, Health, Education, Democracy

“Affected dispatch is one of the most dangerous things to business that can be. It is like that, which the physicians call predigestion, or hasty digestion; which is sure to fill the body full of crudities, and secret seeds of diseases. Therefore measure not dispatch, by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of the business.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Dispatch
Essays (1625)

Secret, Business, Time

“For a desperate disease a desperate cure.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 3. The Custom of the Isle of Cea
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“We were told in one lecture that it was possible to immunize against diphtheria and tetanus by the use of chemically treated toxins, or toxoids. And the following lecture, we were told that for immunization against a virus disease, you have to experience the infection, and that you could not induce immunity with the so-called "killed" or inactivated, chemically treated virus preparation. Well, somehow, that struck me. What struck me was that both statements couldn't be true. And I asked why this was so, and the answer that was given was in a sense, 'Because.'”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

There was no satisfactory answer.
Academy of Achievement interview (1991)

Sense

“As a physician I am embarrassed by the lack of initiative and obstructionist policies of my own medical profession toward healthier lifestyles. This is not surprising. Physicians lack training and knowledge of nutrition and are self-serving when they proclaim “patients won't follow plant-based nutrition.” Having counseled patients with severe coronary artery heart disease for over twenty years, I find the opposite to be true. Patients sent home to die by expert cardiologists after failing bypass or stents rejoice as they lose weight, eliminate angina chest pains, lessen their medication, lower their blood sugars, decrease or come off their insulin, revert their positive stress test back to normal, selectively diminish the plaque plugging their arteries, and resume a fully active life empowered by the knowledge that they, not their physicians, have become the locus of control for the disease that was destroying them.”

Caldwell Esselstyn (1933) American physician, author and rower

Foreword https://books.google.it/books?id=6Aosc1wlAXcC&pg=PA1 to No More Bull! by Howard Lyman (New York: Scribner, 2005).

Life, Pain, Home, Knowledge

“The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

December 27, 1857
Journals (1838-1859)

Dogs, Music, Dependency

“I can think of no moral objection to eating human road kills except for the ones that you mentioned like 'what would the relatives think about it?' and 'would the person themselves have wanted it to happen?', but I do worry a bit about slippery slopes; possibly a little bit more than you do.There are barriers that we have set up in our minds and certainly the barrier between Homo sapiens and any other species is an artificial barrier in the sense that its a kind of 'accident' that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct. Never the less it exists and natural barriers that are there can be useful for preventing slippery slopes and therefore I think I can see an objection to breaching such a barrier because you are then in a weaker position to stop people going further.Another example might be suppose you take the argument in favour of abortion up until the baby was one year old, if a baby was one year old and turned out to have some horrible incurable disease that meant it was going to die in agony in later life, what about infanticide? Strictly morally I can see no objection to that at all, I would be in favour of infanticide but I think i would worry about/I think I would wish at least to give consideration to the person who says 'where does it end?'”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

"
Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews (2009)

Life, People, Nature, Thinking

“Thoughtful conservatives are not unattracted to holistic providers' emphasis on self-care and personal responsibility. Thoughtful liberals and socialists are not unattracted to holistic providers' emphasis on environmental factors in disease. But neither left nor right has ever acknowledged that the holistic health movement carries within it the seeds of a whole new approach to a national health care program for this country, with its own coherent ideas about finance, delivery, research and education.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 13, "National Holistic Health Care Program: Too Sensible?," p. 100.

Health, Education, Idea, Personality

“Now this structure of hope (among other things) is also what distinguishes philosophy from the special sciences. There is a relationship with the object that is different in principle in the two cases. The question of the special sciences is in principle ultimately answerable, or, at least, it is not un-answerable. It can be said, in a final way (or some day, one will be able to say in a final way) what is the cause, say, of this particular infectious disease. It is in principle possible that one day someone will say, "It is now scientifically proven that such and such is the case, and no otherwise." But […] a philosophical question can never be finally, conclusively answered. […] The object of philosophy is given to the philosopher on the basis of a hope. This is where Dilthey's words make sense: "The demands on the philosophizing person cannot be satisfied. A physicist is an agreeable entity, useful for himself and others; a philosopher, like the saint, only exists as an ideal." It is in the nature of the special sciences to emerge from a state of wonder to the extent that they reach "results." But the philosopher does not emerge from wonder.
Here is at once the limit and the measure of science, as well as the great value, and great doubtfulness, of philosophy. Certainly, in itself it is a "greater" thing to dwell "under the stars."”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

But man is not made to live "out there" permanently! Certainly, it is a more valuable question, as such, to ask about the whole world and the ultimate nature of things. But the answer is not as easily forthcoming as for the special sciences!
The Dilthey quote is from Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck v. Wartenberg, 1877–1897 (Hall/Salle, 1923), p. 39.
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 109–111

World, Hope, Way, Star

“The butchering of harmless animals cannot fail to produce much of that spirit of insane and hideous exultation in which news of a victory is related altho' purchased by the massacre of a hundred thousand men. If the use of animal food be in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

"On the Vegetable System of Diet" (c. 1815; published in the 1920s), in Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Volume 6 (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), pp. 343-344, original emphasis

Men, Peace, Food, Feeling