Quotes about diseases
page 5

Thomas Middleton photo

“That disease
Of which all old men sicken,—avarice.”

The Roaring Girl (co-written with Thomas Dekker, 1611), Act i. Sc. 1. Compare: "So for a good old gentlemanly vice,/I think I must take up with avarice", Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto i. stanza 216.

Emil M. Cioran photo
Boris Sidis photo

“The main source of psychopathic diseases is the fundamental instinct of fear with its manifestations, the feeling of anxiety, anguish, and worry.”

Boris Sidis (1867–1923) American psychiatrist

Source: The Causation and Treatment of Psychopathic Diseases (1916), p. 33

Michel Foucault photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo
Jack Vance photo
Ted Kennedy photo

“What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system.”

Ted Kennedy (1932–2009) United States Senator

1994. Attributed without source by telegraph.co.uk http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6094226/Ted-Kennedy-quotes.html, 26 August 2009
Attributed

Gro Harlem Brundtland photo

“We have an opportunity to launch a massive effort against infectious diseases.”

Gro Harlem Brundtland (1939) Norwegian politician

Awake! magazine 2003, 10/22 http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102003763?q=Brundtland&p=par

Alexis Carrel photo

“The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous.”

Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) French surgeon and biologist

As quoted by Andrés Horacio Reggiani: God's eugenicist. Alexis Carrel and the sociobiology of decline. Berghahn Books, Oxford 2007, p. 71. See Der Mensch, das unbekannte Wesen. DVA, Stuttgart 1937.
(1935)

Charles Webster Leadbeater photo
John McCain photo

“Contracting a fatal disease.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

In response to a reporter's question, "Are there any circumstances under which you could imagine yourself not still being a candidate when the presidential primaries are held?" (July 2007)
2000s, 2007

Vannevar Bush photo
Jared Diamond photo
Alfred Tarski photo
Richard Nixon photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Clarence Darrow photo
Mao Zedong photo

“What should our policy be towards non-Marxist ideas? As far as unmistakable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy, we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech. But incorrect ideas among the people are quite a different matter. Will it do to ban such ideas and deny them any opportunity for expression? Certainly not. It is not only futile but very harmful to use crude methods in dealing with ideological questions among the people, with questions about man's mental world. You may ban the expression of wrong ideas, but the ideas will still be there. On the other hand, if correct ideas are pampered in hothouses and never exposed to the elements and immunized against disease, they will not win out against erroneous ones. Therefore, it is only by employing the method of discussion, criticism and reasoning that we can really foster correct ideas and overcome wrong ones, and that we can really settle issues.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

" VIII. ON "LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOSSOM LET A HUNDRED SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT CONTEND" AND "LONG-TERM COEXISTENCE AND MUTUAL SUPERVISION" "
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 对于非马克思主义的思想,应该采取什么方针呢?对于明显的反革命分子,破坏社会主义事业的分子,事情好办,剥夺他们的言论自由就行了。对于人民内部的错误思想,情形就不相同。禁止这些思想,不允许这些思想有任何发表的机会,行不行呢?当然不行。对待人民内部的思想问题,对待精神世界的问题,用简单的方法去处理,不但不会收效,而且非常有害。不让发表错误意见,结果错误意见还是存在着。而正确的意见如果是在温室里培养出来的,如果没有见过风雨,没有取得免疫力,遇到错误意见就不能打胜仗。因此,只有采取讨论的方法,批评的方法,说理的方法,才能真正发展正确的意见,克服错误的意见,才能真正解决问题。

Willem Roelofs photo

“.. at least I have the conviction of being honest and I do despise most of all those…. alienating works of art [eg. of Seurat ], the disease of our time. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) ..ik heb tenminste de overtuiging van opregt te zijn en heb geen grooter afschuw dan van alle.. ..vreemdsoortige kunstuitingen [oa. van ] de ziekte van onzen tijd.
In a letter, 19 Nov. 1889; as cited in Willem Roelofs 1822-1897 De Adem der natuur, ed. Marjan van Heteren & Robert-Jan te Rijdt; Thoth, Bussum, 2006, p. 18 - ISBN13 * 978 90 6868 432 2
1880's

David Hume photo
Marek Sanak photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”

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

" Is Science a Religion? http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html", The Humanist (January 1997)

Erik Naggum photo
William H. McNeill photo
H. G. Wells photo
Lana Turner photo

“Trash is something you get rid of—or disease. I'm not something you get rid of.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On her self worth, p. 46.
Autobiography

Włodzimierz Ptak photo
Robert LeFevre photo

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Financial Sense http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/steer/2007/0805.html Also quoted in “Covert Operation”, Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, (Aug. 30, 2010)

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar photo

“Indifferentism is the worst kind of disease that can affect people.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)

Clive Staples Lewis photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
William Ewart Gladstone photo

“The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the world.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech, Plumstead (30 November 1878)
1870s

John Derbyshire photo
Neal D. Barnard photo
George William Curtis photo

“Mayor Macbeth, of Charleston, told General Howard that he did not believe that a bureau at Washington could manage the social relations of the people from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But the answer to Mayor Macbeth is that he and his companions have managed those relations at a cost to the country of four years of civil war, three thousand millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives. The Freedmen's Bureau will hardly be as expensive as that. And while such a bureau merely defends the rights of a certain class under the laws, the aid societies give them that education which in the present state of local feeling would be inevitably withheld. The mighty arch of Sherman, wasting and taming the land, is followed by the noiseless steps of the band of unnamed heroes and heroines who are teaching the people. The soldier drew the furrow, the teacher drops the seed. There is many and many a devoted woman, hidden at this moment in the lowliest cabins of the South, whose name poets will not sing nor historians record, but whose patient toil the eye that marks the sparrow's fall beholds and approves. Not more noble, not more essential, was the work of the bravest and most famous of the heroes who fell in the wild storm of battle, than that of many a woman to us unknown, faithful through privation and exposure and disease, and perishing at the lonely outpost of duty in the act of helping the nation keep its word.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Bill Clinton photo
Marcus Terentius Varro photo

“There are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.”
Crescunt animalia quaedam minuta, quae non possunt oculi consequi, et per aera intus in corpus per os ac nares perveniunt atque efficiunt difficilis morbos.

Marcus Terentius Varro (-116–-27 BC) ancient latin scholar

Marcus Porcius Cato on Agriculture : Marcus Terentius Varro on Agriculture. W.D. Hooper & H.B. Ash. (translation). Harvard University Press, 1993. Bk. 1, ch. 12
De Re Rustica

Halldór Laxness photo
Max Beckmann photo

“.. [war] in itself is one of the manifestations of life, like disease, love, and lust. And just as I follow fear, disease, lust, love, and hate to their utmost limits, well, now I am trying war. It is all life, wonderfully various and rich in inspiration.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Briefe im Kriege May 1915, p. 67; as quoted in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 79
1900s - 1920s

William H. McNeill photo
Eminem photo
Venus Williams photo
Peter Mere Latham photo

“Perfect health, like perfect beauty, is a rare thing; and so, it seems, is perfect disease.”

Peter Mere Latham (1789–1875) English physician and educator

Infertility Counseling: A Comprehensive Handbook for Clinicians - Page 179 by Linda Hammer Burns, Sharon N. Covington - Medical - 2000.
Collected Works

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“There are some remedies worse than the disease.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 301
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Robert Burton photo
Jared Diamond photo
Mark Knopfler photo
Cora L. V. Scott photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Thomas Edison photo

“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

This has been reprinted many times with slight variations on the wording; it is part of a much larger quote directly from Edison published in 1903:
:Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
They may even discover the germ of old age. I don't predict it, but it might be by the sacrifice of animal life human life could be prolonged.
Surgery, diet, antiseptics — these three are the vital things of the future in preserving the health of humanity. There were never so many able, active minds at work on the problems of diseases as now, and all their discoveries are tending to the simple truth — that you can't improve on nature.
:* As quoted in "Wizard Edison" in The Newark Advocate (2 January 1903), p. 1 according to research by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson at snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/quotes/edison.asp.
1900s

William H. McNeill photo
Buckminster Fuller photo
Tomas Kalnoky photo
Peter Tatchell photo
Thomas Szasz photo
Anthony Burgess photo

“…Daudet differs from the hate-filled Baudelaire and Maupassant in being gentle to fellow-sufferers from the disease of life. Syphilis in him did not engender misanthropy.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

"A Pox on Literature" - review of The Horror of Life by Roger L. Williams.
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Amy Lowell photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Kage Baker photo

“As it had been explained to David long ago, genetic diversity was very, very important. The more diverse the human gene pool was, the better were humanity’s chances of adapting to any new and unexpected conditions it might encounter, now that it was beginning to push outward into Space, to say nothing of surviving any unexpected natural disasters such as polar shifts or meteor strikes on Earth.
Unfortunately, humanity had been both unlucky and foolish. Out of the dozens of races that had once lived in the world, only a handful had survived into modern times. Some ancient races had been rendered extinct by war. Some had been simply crowded out, retreating into remote regions and forced to breed amongst themselves, which killed them off with lethal recessives.
That had been the bad luck. The foolishness had come when people began to form theories about the process of Evolution. They got it all wrong: most people interpreted the concept of “survival of the fittest” to mean they ought to narrow the gene pool, reducing it in size. So this was done, in genocidal wars and eugenics programs, and how surprised people were when lethal recessives began to occur more frequently! To say nothing of the populations who died in droves when diseases swept through them, because they were all so genetically similar there were none among them with natural immunities.”

Source: The Machine's Child (2006), Chapter 29, “Still Another Morning in 500,000 BCE” (p. 330)

Richard Feynman photo
John Donne photo

“I observe the physician, with the same diligence, as he the disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him…”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

VI. Metuit. The physician is afraid
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

Peter Damian photo

“But you, my lord and venerable pope, you who take the place of Christ, and the successor to the supreme shepherd in apostolic dignity, do not through sloth allow this pestilence to grow, do not by conniving and dissimulation loosen the reins on this raging impurity. This disease is spreading like a cancer, and its poisonous breed will reach out endlessly unless its evil growth is cut off by the scythe of the gospel.”

Peter Damian (1007–1072) reformist monk

Letter 61:14. To Pope Nicholas II. Damian “deplores the situation in which bishops live in public concubinage to the scandal of some, and to the delight of others who ridicule the leadership of the Church on this account.” January - July 1059.
The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, Letters 61-90, 1992, Owen J. Blum, tr., Catholic University of America Press, ISBN 0813207509 ISBN 978-0813207506, vol. 3, p. 12 http://books.google.com/books?id=9smLdu9BvK0C&pg=PA12&dq=%22my+lord+and+venerable+pope,+you+who+take+the+place+of%22&hl=en&ei=N2xiTIOVIYT78Aa0-YGkCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22my%20lord%20and%20venerable%20pope%2C%20you%20who%20take%20the%20place%20of%22&f=false

Henry Miller photo
George W. Bush photo
William Osler photo

“To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.”

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

"Books and Men" in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (1901).

Georges Rouault photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Ptahhotep photo

“Beware an act of avarice; it is bad and incurable disease.”

Ptahhotep Ancient Egyptian vizier

Maxim no. 19.
The Maxims of Ptahhotep (c. 2350 BCE)

“How to control my sex instinct so as to make it conduce my permanent happiness and not to disease, mental misery, and the wrecking of my career.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

“The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.”

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) British economist

Source: Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), p. 35.

Tawakkol Karman photo
Norman Tebbit photo
David Brooks photo

“Are we really here? Is this really happening? Is this America? Are we a great country talking about trying to straddle the world and create opportunity in this country? It's just mind-boggling. And we have sort of become acculturated, because this campaign has been so ugly. We have become acculturated to sleaze and unhappiness that you just want to shower from every 15 minutes. The Trump comparison of the looks of the wives, he does have, over the course of his life, a consistent misogynistic view of women as arm candy, as pieces of meat. It’s a consistent attitude toward women which is the stuff of a diseased adolescent. And so we have seen a bit of that show up again. But if you go back over his past, calling into radio shows bragging about his affairs, talking about his sex life in public, he is childish in his immaturity. And his — even his misogyny is a childish misogyny. And that’s why I do not think Republicans, standard Republicans, can say, yes, I’m going to vote for this guy because he’s our nominee. He’s of a different order than your normal candidate. And this whole week is just another reminder of that… The odd thing about his whole career and his whole language, his whole world view is there is no room for love in it. You get a sense of a man who received no love, can give no love, so his relationship with women, it has no love in it. It’s trophy. And his relationship toward the world is one of competition and beating, and as if he’s going to win by competition what other people get by love. And so you really are seeing someone who just has an odd psychology unleavened by kindness and charity, but where it’s all winners and losers, beating and being beat. And that’s part of the authoritarian personality, but it comes out in his attitude towards women.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

David Brooks, as quoted in "Shields and Brooks on Trump-Cruz wife feud, ISIS terror in Brussels" http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-and-brooks-on-trump-cruz-wife-feud-isis-terror-in-brussels/ (25 March 2016), PBS NewsHour
2010s

Thomas Chalmers photo
Alexej von Jawlensky photo
Michael Greger photo
Newton Lee photo

“It is high time we treated drug abuse and terrorism as diseases instead of wars -- curing the patients rather than killing them.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Karen Armstrong photo
Frederick II of Prussia photo
Anne Sexton photo

“Catch me. I'm your disease.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"Eighteen Days Without You": December 18th
Love Poems (1969)

Rebecca West photo

“Socialism is not a bomb thrown at the natural institution of society, but a well-considered medicine for a diseased community.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"A Training in Trucelence", in The Clarion, (14 February 1913), re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 157.

Edward O. Wilson photo

“I have Bright's disease and he has mine.”

S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) American humorist, author, and screenwriter

A patient confronts his doctor, in a cartoon printed in Judge magazine (November 16, 1929)

Kate Clinton photo
George Moore (novelist) photo

“The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 7.

Anthony Burgess photo