Quotes about diseases
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“[Beauty is] "Perfection of rhythm, balanced perfection of rhythm. Everything in Nature is expressed by rhythmic waves of light. Every thought and action is a light-wave of thought and action. If one interprets the God within one, one’s thoughts and actions must be balanced rhythmic waves. Ugliness, fears, failures and diseases arise from unbalanced thoughts and actions. Therefore think beauty always if one desire vitality of body and happiness."”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

God, Fear, Beauty, Failure

““But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked.
“Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”
“But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things — if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!”
Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?”
“Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?”
“It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it. Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.”
“But, but lunatics could brew up biological weapons in their kitchens, destroy cities! Anarchists would acquire the power to overthrow the state, and nobody would be able to tell who they were or where they belonged anymore. The most foul nonsense would be spread, and nobody could stop it—” Vassily paused. “You don’t believe me,” he said plaintively.
“Oh, we believe you alright,” Martin said grimly. “It’s just—look, change isn’t always bad. Sometimes freedom of speech provides a release valve for social tensions that would lead to revolution. And at other times, well—what you’re protesting about boils down to a dislike for anything that disturbs the status quo. You see your government as a security blanket, a warm fluffy cover that’ll protect everybody from anything bad all the time. There’s a lot of that kind of thinking in the New Republic; the idea that people who aren’t kept firmly in their place will automatically behave badly. But where I come from, most people have enough common sense to avoid things that’d harm them; and those that don’t, need to be taught. Censorship just drives problems underground.”
“But, terrorists!”
“Yes,” Rachel interrupted, “terrorists. There are always people who think they’re doing the right thing by inflicting misery on their enemies, kid. And you’re perfectly right about brewing up biological weapons and spreading rumors. But—” She shrugged. “We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” She looked grim. “If you think a lunatic planting a nuclear weapon in a city is bad, you’ve never seen what happens when a planet pushed the idea of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship to the limit. There are places where—” She shuddered.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 14, “The Telephone Repairman” (pp. 296-297)

People, Way, Communication, Idea

“Life is an incurable disease.”

Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer

To Dr. Scarborough; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Life

“Man who preys both on the vegetable and animal species, is himself a prey to neither. He too possesses the reproductive principle far beyond the degree requisite for the bare continuance of his species. What becomes of the surplus of human life to which this principle is competent?
It is either, 1st. destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2d. it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3d. it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th. it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

"Population and Emigration" in National Gazette (21 November 1791) http://www.constitution.org/jm/17911121_population.htm; also quoted in If Men Were Angels: James Madison & the Heartless Empire of Reason (1995) by Richard K. Matthews. p. 44 1790s

Life, War, Food, Animals

“God does not exist—religion in science is an absurdity, in practice an immorality and in men a disease.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

“Religion: Benito a Christian?” Time magazine (August 25, 1924)
1920s

Men, God, Religion, Science

“The societies to which most readers of this book belong represent a narrow slice of human cultural diversity. Societies from that slice achieved world dominance not because of a general superiority, but for specific reasons: their technological, political, and military advantages derived from their early origins of agriculture, due in turn to their productive local wild domesticable plant and animal species. Despite those particular advantages, modern industrial societies didn’t also develop superior approaches to raising children, treating the elderly, settling disputes, avoiding non-communicable diseases, and other societal problems. Thousands of traditional societies developed a wide array of different approaches to those problems.”

Jared Diamond book The World Until Yesterday

Epilogue
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012)

Children, Books, World, Problem

“The diagnosis of disease is often easy, often difficult, and often impossible.”

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

Book I, p. 173.
Collected Works

“Multilateral organizations have made bold commitments of their own to fight disease. The G-8 has pledged to match America's efforts on malaria and HIV/AIDS. Through the Global Fund, many countries are working to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria, and T-B. Lives in the developing world depend on these programs, and all who have made pledges to fight disease have an obligation to follow through on their commitments.”

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

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

World, Effort, Fight, Dependency

“If perfect health is the best preventive and security against disease, and if a well-selected and properly administered vegetable diet is best calculated to promote and preserve that perfect health, then this part of the subject — what I have ventured to call the medical argument — is at once disposed of. The superiority of the diet I recommend is established beyond the possibility of debate. Now, that this is the case — namely, that this diet is best calculated to promote perfect health — I have no doubt.”

William Alcott (1798–1859) American physician and author

Source: Vegetable Diet (1838), p. 240

Health, Parting, Perfection

“Growing old: the most common mitochondrial disease of all?”

Anita Harding (1952–1995) neurologist

Title of article published in Natural Genetics (1992), 2:251-2; cited in Stephen Waxman (2010) Molecular Neurology. p. 536

“We don't have a health care system. We have a health care maze. And we don't have a health care crisis. We have a health crisis. Eighty percent of the $2 trillion we spend on health care in this country is spent on chronic disease. If we don't change the health of this nation by focusing on prevention, we're never going to catch up with the costs no matter what plan we have. … And we've got a situation with 10,000 baby boomers a day signing up for Social Security, going into the Medicare system. And I just want to remind everybody when all the old hippies find out that they get free drugs, just wait until what that's going to cost out there.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Republican Presidential Debate, 2007-10-21, quoted in [The Republican Debate on Fox News Channel, 2007-10-21, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/us/politics/21debate-transcript.html?pagewanted=9, 2011-03-01]
Republican Debates

Health, Change, Waiting, Baby

“Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, UN speech

Hope, Future

“While the visible victims may draw the headlines and attract indignant protests from so-called "pro-life" organizations, the invisible victims are people like you and me who will suffer from diseases that are never cured because funds are being poured down a healthcare sieve in order to maintain permanently-unconscious bodies on complex and costly forms of life support.”

Jacob M. Appel (1973) American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic

"Rational Rationing vs. Irrational Rationing" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-m-appel/rational-rationing-vs-irr_b_622057.html, The Huffington Post (2010-06-23)

Life, People, Support, Suffering

“When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, The Humble Programmer (1972)

“Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure. They hope to recover the unreflective faith of traditional cultures, but this is a peculiarly modern fantasy. We cannot believe as we please; our beliefs are traces left by our unchosen lives. A view of the world is not something that can be conjured up as and when we please.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Against fundamentalism ― religious and scientific (p. 18)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World, Faith, Hope, Reality

“When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word “depression.” Depression, most people know, used to be termed “melancholia,” a word which appears in English as early as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. “Melancholia” would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated — the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer — had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering “depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.
As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. “Brainstorm,” for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed. Told that someone’s mood disorder has evolved into a storm — a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else — even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that “depression” evokes, something akin to “So what?” or “You’ll pull out of it” or “We all have bad days.””

William Styron book Darkness Visible

The phrase “nervous breakdown” seems to be on its way out, certainly deservedly so, owing to its insinuation of a vague spinelessness, but we still seem destined to be saddled with “depression” until a better, sturdier name is created.
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), IV

People, School, Way, Mood

“The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internist’s wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning. Obviously, it is a great time-saver and money-saver for the physician’s family that anxiety about disease is not handled as though it were the disease itself; there is perhaps greater willingness to accept anxiety as a natural, often transient, phenomenon. And certainly there is much less ambition to deploy the full technology of medicine as a corrective for the human condition.”

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

Source: Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy (1972), p. 3

Money, Marriage, Secret, Family

“There are antibiotic ointments that aid in the healing of external wounds. Similarly, there are many different kinds of medication available to treat diseases of our internal organs, but there is only one medicine that can heal the wounds of our mind. This medicine is pure love. In order to heal the mental and emotional wounds inflicted upon the victims of human trafficking, we need to care for them with selfless love.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

From Amritanandamayi's Speech Against Human Trafficking and Slavery at the Vatican (2014)

Love

“Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

People, Books, World, Guy

“In addition to preventing many chronic diseases … comprehensive lifestyle changes can often reverse the progression of these illnesses. … Changing lifestyle actually changes your genes—turning on genes that keep you healthy, and turning off genes that promote heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and diabetes—more than five hundred genes in only three months. People often say, “Oh, it's all in my genes. There's not much I can do about it.” But there is. Knowing that changing lifestyle changes our genes is often very motivating—not to blame, but to empower. … [Our approach is] not like there was one set of dietary recommendations for reversing heart disease, a different one for reversing diabetes, and yet another for changing your genes or lengthening your telomeres. In all of our studies, people were asked to consume a whole-foods, plant-based diet … It's as though your body knows how to personalize the medicine it needs if you give it the right raw materials in your diet and lifestyle. … And what's good for you is good for our planet. To the degree we transition toward a whole-foods, plant-based diet, it not only makes a difference in our own lives; it also makes a difference in the lives of many others across the globe.”

Dean Ornish (1953) American physician

Introduction https://books.google.it/books?id=KfeoBAAAQBAJ&pg=PP12 to Marco Borges, The 22-Day Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2015).

People, Food, Motivation, Study

“The mind, like the body, has its contagious diseases and its scurvy. …[W]e catch everything from those with whom we come in contact; their gestures, their accent, etc.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie book Man a Machine

Man a Machine (1747)

“we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations.*12 But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders. http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong30.html#dd12 Book IV, Chapter V”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)

Men, People, Nature, Housing

“The infectious diseases that regularly visited crowded Eurasian societies, and to which many Eurasians consequently developed immune or genetic resistance, included all of history's most lethal killers: smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, malaria, and others.”

Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), p. 357

History

“We're all grossly ignorant about most things that we use and encounter in our daily lives, but each of us is knowledgeable about tiny, relatively inconsequential things. For example, a baker might be the best baker in town, but he's grossly ignorant about virtually all the inputs that allow him to be the best baker. What is he likely to know about what goes into the processing of the natural gas that fuels his oven? For that matter, what does he know about oven manufacture? Then, there are all the ingredients he uses -- flour, sugar, yeast, vanilla and milk. Is he likely to know how to grow wheat and sugar and how to protect the crop from diseases and pests? What is he likely to know about vanilla extraction and yeast production? Just as important is the question of how all the people who produce and deliver all these items know what he needs and when he needs them. There are literally millions of people cooperating with one another to ensure that the baker has all the necessary inputs. It's the miracle of the market and prices that gets the job done so efficiently. What's called the market is simply a collection of millions upon millions of independent decision makers not only in America but around the world. Who or what coordinates the activities all of these people? Rest assuredly it's not a bakery czar.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

1970s, Economics for the Citizen (1978)

People, World, Question, Nature

“The fatal conceit of Obamacare is that we’re just gonna make everybody buy our health insurance at the federal-government level, young and healthy people are going to go into the market and pay for the older, sicker people. So, the young healthy person is going to be made to buy health care, and they’re going to pay for the person, you know, gets breast cancer in her 40s or who gets heart disease in his 50s. […] The whole idea of Obamacare is … the people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick. It’s not working, and that’s why it’s in a death spiral.”

Paul Ryan (1970) American politician

Presentation for Capital Hill reporters, MSNBC "Paul Ryan flubs the basic idea behind insurance" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/paul-ryan-flubs-the-basic-idea-behind-insurance 9 March 2017

Death, People, Health, Idea

“The lukewarm baths at 25 to 27° serve to arouse the slumbering sensibility of fibre in the apparent dead (frozen, drowned, suffocated) which benumbed the sensation of the nerves. Though only palliative, still they often prove themselves sufficiently active, especially when given in conjunction with coffee and rubbing with the hands. They may give homœopathic aid in cases where the irritability is very unevenly distributed and accumulated too unevenly in some organs as is the case in certain hysteric spasms and infantile convulsions. In the same way, cold baths 10 to 6° in persons cured medically of chronic diseases and with deficiency of vital heat, act as an homœopathic aid. By instantaneous and later with repeated immersions they act as a palliative restorative of the tone of the exhausted fibre. For this purpose, such baths are to be used for more than momentary duration, rather for minutes and of gradually lowered temperature, they are a palliative, which, since it acts only physically has no connection with the disadvantage of a reverse action to be feared afterwards, as takes place with dynamic medicinal palliatives.”

Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) German physician best known for creating a system of alternative medicine called homeopathy

Aphorism 291 of The Organon of the Healing Art http://www.homeopathyhome.com/reference/organon/organon.html.

Fear, Way, Coffee, Personality

“But that disease when soberly defined
Is the false fire of an o'erheated mind.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Conversation (1782), Line 667; of fanaticism.

Falseness

“Today, the stranglehold of the controlling negative forces upon Earth is extremely advanced and is choking the very life from our planet. The effects of this are evident everywhere in the form of fear, separation, war, disease and multifarious kinds of disharmony on all levels.”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: The Veil of Tears

Life, War, Fear

“Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Founding Address (1876)

“Perhaps we could benefit by selectively adopting some of those traditional practices. Some of us already do so, with demonstrated benefits to our health and happiness. In some respects we moderns are misfits; our bodies and our practices now face conditions different from those under which they evolved, and to which they became adapted. But we should also not go to the opposite extreme of romanticizing the past and longing for simpler times. Many traditional practices are ones that we can consider ourselves blessed to have discarded — such as infanticide, abandoning or killing elderly people, facing periodic risk of starvation, being at heightened risk from environmental dangers and infectious diseases, often seeing one’s children die, and living in constant fear of being attacked. Traditional societies may not only suggest to us some better living practices, but may also help us appreciate some advantages of our own society that we take for granted.”

Jared Diamond book The World Until Yesterday

Prologue, section "Why study traditional societies?"
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012)

Children, People, Health, Fear

“Columbus, I guess it all did start with Columbus. … To me he was like a virus, a disease. I spent a lot of time protesting, trying to figure out how to deal with this disease. I think we really need to put serious thought into understanding that we're dealing with a disease.”

John Trudell (1946–2015) Native American rights activist, musician, poet

Columbus Day Speech, San Francisco (1992)

Understanding, Thinking, Time

“Eugenics should, therefore, not be allowed to deceive us into the belief that we should try to raise a race of supermen, nor that it should be our aim to eliminate all suffering and pain. The attempt to suppress those defective classes whose deficiencies can be proved by rigid methods to be due to hereditary causes, and to prevent unions that will unavoidably lead to the birth of disease-stricken progeny, is the proper field of eugenics. How much can be and should be attempted in this field depends upon the results of careful studies of the law of heredity. Eugenics is not a panacea that will cure human ills, it is rather a dangerous sword that may turn its edge against those who rely on its strength.”

Franz Boas (1858–1942) German-American anthropologist

Eugenics, in The Scientific Monthly, J. McKeen Cattell, ed., Vol. 3, No. 5,(November, 1916) http://books.google.com/books?id=JKLRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA478&dq=%22not+be+allowed+to+deceive+us+into+the+belief+that+we+should+try+to+raise+a+race%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=T6O1U7SkOtefyASFgIHIDg&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22vol%203%20no%205%22%20november%201916&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=JKLRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA478&dq=%22not+be+allowed+to+deceive+us+into+the+belief+that+we+should+try+to+raise+a+race%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=T6O1U7SkOtefyASFgIHIDg&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22not%20be%20allowed%20to%20deceive%20us%20into%20the%20belief%20that%20we%20should%20try%20to%20raise%20a%20race%22&f=false.

Pain, Law, Birth, Study

“And the high mandate of his sire.
Led by the Lord who rules the sky,
The Gods and heavenly saints drew nigh,
And honoured him with worthy meed,
Rejoicing in each glorious deed.
His task achieved, his foe removed,
He triumphed, by the Gods approved.
By grace of Heaven he raised to life
The chieftains slain in mortal strife;
Then in the magic chariot through
The clouds to Nandigráma flew.
Met by his faithful brothers there,
He loosed his votive coil of hair:
Thence fair Ayodhyá's town he gained,
And o'er his father's kingdom reigned.
Disease or famine ne'er oppressed
His happy people, richly blest.”

Vālmīki Legendary Indian poet, author of the Ramayana

Source: King of Siam Rama I "The-Ramayana", p. 28.

Life, God, People, Faith

“To me, there is no doctrine so infinitely absurd as the idea that this life is a probationary state—that the few moments spent here decide the fate of a human soul forever. Nothing can be conceived more merciless, more unjust. I am doing all I can to destroy that doctrine. I want, if possible, to get the shadow of hell from the human heart. Why has any life been a failure here? If God is a being of infinite wisdom and kindness, why does he make failures? What excuse has infinite wisdom for peopling the world with savages? Why should one feel grateful to God for having made him with a poor, weak and diseased brain; for having allowed him to be the heir of consumption, of scrofula, or of insanity? Why should one thank God, who lived and died a slave”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)

Life, Wisdom, God, Fate

“The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. … The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“November: A Mighty Fortress”, p. 77.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "November: Axe-in-Hand," "November: A Mighty Fortress," and "December: Pines above the Snow"

Tree, Animals, Dead

“Body dysmorphia has got to go. Its similar to a disease called "crazy eyes" not the way others look at you, but the way you see yourself. The insanity which we use as our vision….”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, HATING ONESELF

Way

“It doesn't pay to say there's no Devil and no demons and no such thing as evil, sin, or sickness, and just try to ignore the facts. It would be like trying to ignore that you have a disease when you've really got it, because as long as you have it and try to hide it, you can't very well find the remedy.”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Attack!

Evil

“Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

Stupidity

“The advantage of pure, and the disadvantage of impure air are experienced each time we breathe, and all who understand the causes of disease know that an impure atmosphere is most unfavourable to the enjoyment of health, and an efficient cause to shorten human existence within the natural life of man. It is therefore most desirable that decisive measures should be devised and generally adopted to ensure to all a pure atmosphere, in which to live during their lives.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

3rd Part
The Book of the New Moral World (1836-1844)

Life, Health, Understanding, Nature

“2001. Find out thy own Mistakes, and Failings, in order to amend them. A Disease known is half cured.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

“Early findings from the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease are challenging much of American dietary dogma. The [Cornell–Oxford] study, being conducted in China, paints a bold portrait of a plant-based eating plan that is more likely to promote health than disease. The study can be considered the Grand Prix of epidemiology.”

Jane E. Brody (1941) American writer

"Huge Study Of Diet Indicts Fat And Meat", in The New York Times (8 May 1990) http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/08/science/huge-study-of-diet-indicts-fat-and-meat.html

Health, Study, Painting

“When you think a negative thought, it releases poison in your system. Next thing you know, you wind up with cancer or other diseases. I try to live in the moment without regrets.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

Willie Nelson Speaks Out on Medical Marijuana, Barbra Streisand and More, August/September 2014, August 5, 2014, AARP Magazine, AARP http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/music/info-2014/willie-nelson-country-music-legend.html,

Thinking

“This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Aliens Cause Global Warming (2003)

Fear, Understanding

“The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in actual physical disease and death right through our midst; it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical Puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing — even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

Love, Life, Death, Women

“[The Taoist priest] said to Chia Jui, "This mirror was made by the Goddess of Disillusionment and is designed to cure diseases resulting from impure thoughts and self-destructive habits. It is intended for youths such as you. But do not look into the right side. Use only the reverse side of the mirror. I shall be back for it in three days and congratulate you on your recovery." He went away, refusing to accept any money.
Chia Jui took the mirror and looked into the reverse side as the Taoist had directed. He threw it down in horror, for he saw a gruesome skeleton staring at him through its hollow eyes. He cursed the Taoist for playing such a crude joke upon him. Then he thought he would see what was on the right side. When he did so, he saw Phoenix standing there and beckoning to him. Chia Jui felt himself wafted into a mirror world, wherein he fulfilled his desire. He woke up from his trance and found the mirror lying wrong side up, revealing the horrible skeleton. He felt exhausted from the experience that the more deceptive side of the mirror gave him, but it was so delicious that he could not resist the temptation of looking into the right side again. Again he saw Phoenix beckoning to him and again he yielded to the temptation. This happened three or four times. When he was about to leave the mirror on his last visit, he was seized by two men and put in chains.
"Just a moment, officers," Chia Jui pleaded. "Let me take my mirror with me."”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

These were his last words.
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), pp. 89–90

Men, Money, Youth, World

“To fix the fluctuating mass of theories, no man has suggested any other expedient than the construction of some new theory, to whose authority… all persons shall submit. The remedy is constantly augmenting the disease.”

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786–1867) United States philosopher and banker

Lecture I. §4.
A Treatise on Language: Or, The Relation which Words Bear to Things, in Four Parts (1836)

Personality

“Earth, Earth,” the short, alien Carmody mused. “I think I remember the name now. There was a recent study of isolated worlds and the peculiarities of their development. Earth was mentioned as a planet covered with an obsessively overproductive species. Object manipulation is their outstanding modality. Their project is an attempt to live in their own, ever-accumulating waste products. In short, Earth is diseased place. I believe it is being phased out of the Galactic Master Plan on the basis of chronic cosmic incompatibility. The place will then be rehabilitated and turned into a refuge for daffodils.”

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 4 (p. 29)

World, Thinking, Study

“There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthfulness: madness, in all its hideous variety, from the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill-temper, that make a hell of domestic life, into a calm and considerable evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation of society.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book A Vindication of Natural Diet

A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)

Life, Health, Hell, Water

“Nearby, where the main road forked, stood an iron cross on a stone base. As the English couple watched, a mason was cutting in half a dozen fresh names. On the far side of the street, in the deep shadow of a doorway, a youngish woman in black was also watching. She was so pale they assumed at first she had some sort of wasting disease. She remained perfectly still, with one hand holding an edge of her headscarf so that it obscured her mouth. The mason seemed embarrassed and kept his back to her while he worked. After a quarter of an hour an old man in blue workman's clothes came shuffling along in carpet slippers and took her hand without a word and led her away. When the propriétaire came out he nodded at the other side of the street, at the empty space and murmured, 'Trois. Mari et deux frères,' as he set down their salads.This sombre incident remained with them as they struggled up the hill in the heat, heavy with lunch, towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. They stopped half way up in the shade of a stand of pines before a long stretch of open ground. Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”

Ian McEwan book Black Dogs

Page 164-165.
Black Dogs (1992)

Love, Life, Death, War

“History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Speech on Afghanistan (4 January 1980) http://millercenter.org/president/carter/speeches/speech-3403 Presidency (1977–1981), 1978

World, History, Learning

“Among the many early revelations from molecular phylogenetic studies of bacteria (Woese, 1987) was the recognition that the mycoplasmas represented an evolutionarily derived condition rather than a primitive one, as once believed. Now that phylogenetic relationships and genome sizes are determined for a broader array of organisms, it is clear that the mycoplasmas are just one example of genome shrinkage that has occurred in a variety of obligately host-associated bacteria. Other prominent examples are Rickettsia and related pathogens within the α-proteobacteria; insect symbionts within the γ-proteobacteria, as exemplified by Buchnera aphidicola in aphids; the chlamydiae; and the parasitic spirochetes, such as Borrelia burgdorferi”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

the agent of Lyme disease
[Cell, 108, 5, 8 March 2002, 583–586, Minireview Microbial Minimalism: Genome Reduction in Bacterial Pathogens, 10.1016/S0092-8674(02)00665-7]

Study

“Cure the disease and kill the patient.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Friendship
Essays (1625)
Variant: Cure the disease, and kill the patient.

“A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.”

Guy Fawkes (1570–1606) English member of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605

Remark (6 November 1605) as quoted in The Dictionary of National Biography Vol. 6 (1917); He is here invoking a version of a famous statement of Hippocrates, also translated as "Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases."

“When you consider your choices—heart disease, colon cancer, plus-size pants, melting ice caps, gale force storms, and animal suffering vs. good health, energy, a trim physique, a livable planet, compassion, and tasty, diverse foods—it's clear that going vegetarian is an excellent choice as we move toward living a more conscious life.”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

"One Bite at a Time: A Beginner's Guide to Conscious Eating", in the HuffPost (27 February 2007) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-bite-at-a-time-a-begi_b_42211.

Life, Health, Food, Suffering

“In the last few decades, it has become increasingly clear that humanity is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Modern science has developed effective measures that could solve most of the urgent problems in today's world--combat the majority of diseases, eliminate hunger and poverty, reduce the amount of industrial waste, and replace destructive fossil fuels by renewable sources of clean energy. The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species.”

Stanislav Grof (1931) Czech pychiatrist

The Cosmic Game - Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (1997), ISBN 0-7914-3876-7, p. 219.

Hunger, Lie, World, Way

“It was not her eloquence but her healing of the sick which raised Sharon to such eminence that she promised to become the most renowned evangelist in America. People were tired of eloquence; and the whole evangelist business was limited, since even the most ardent were not likely to be saved more than three of four times. But they could be healed constantly, and of the same disease.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

People, Business, Time

“With a mind not diseased, a holy life is a life of hope; and at the end of it, death is a great act of hope.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 328.

Life, Death, Hope

“Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

Quoted in: Peter McWilliams (1997) Love 101: To Love Oneself Is the Beginning of a Lifelong Romance. p. 23
undated quotes

Love

“We have already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than us — the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, stuff them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitat. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advanced humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitat. Any advanced extraterrestrials who discovered us would surely treat us in the same way…If there really are any radio civilizations within listening distance of us, then for heaven's sake let's turn off our own transmitters and try to escape detection, or we are doomed.”

Jared Diamond book The Third Chimpanzee

The Third Chimpanzee (1991)
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991)

Way, Intelligence, Communication

“As a bodily disease cannot be healed, if it be concealed, or praised, thus also, neither can a remedy be applied to a diseased soul, which is badly guarded and protected.”

Stobaeus Ancient Greek anthologist

24
Pythagorean Ethical Sentences

Soul

“This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Video may be viewed here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppDWD3VwxVg. TED, February (2009)

Men, Money, Laughter, Affliction

“Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions?””

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 102.

Communication

“The current American diet is based on animal flesh and processed food: saturated fat, denatured animal protein, cholesterol, oils, refined sugars. This food is incredibly toxic to the blood vessels and the immune system, and it flows through our bloodstreams, and our children's, every four or five hours. The results are predictable. We're becoming grossly obese, arteries are clogging up. High blood pressure, diabetes, cancers. Autoimmune diseases have direct correlations with the meat and salt in animal products. The vast majority of diseases are created today by what people are eating in the West. Until that is recognized, we're just going to be treating symptoms. We're not getting to the root cause of disease, and that is the great transgression that the medical profession inadvertently perpetrates on the public.”

Michael Klaper (1947) American physician

Interview in the book What the Health https://books.google.it/books?id=FIY8DgAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 by Eunice Wong (Xlibris, 2017), ch. 1.

Children, People, Food, Animals

“A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane and ill-advised, and the whole species' existence counts on them doing it. I don't know how they…how do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We're the number one threat to women. Globally and historically, we're the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We're the worst thing that ever happens to them. That's true! You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

Oh My God

Women, Men, Guy, Heart

“Philosophy is certainly the medicine of the soul. Its aid is to be sought not from without, as in diseases of the body; and we must labour with all our resources and with all our strength to cure ourselves.”
Est profecto animi medicina, philosophia; cuius auxilium non ut in corporis morbis petendum est foris, omnibusque opibus viribus, ut nosmet ipsi nobis mederi possimus, elaborandum est.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book III, Chapter III; translation by Walter Miller
Tusculanae Disputationes – Tusculan Disputations (45 BC)

Soul

“This connection, at once semantic and conceptual, between unorthodoxy and sodomy, was firmly established during the late Middle Ages, and has never been severed. It is as strong today as it was six hundred years ago. To be stigmatized as a heretic or bugger in the fourteenth century was to cast out of society. Since the dominant ideology was theological, religious deviance was considered so grave an offense as to render the individual a nonperson. Whatever redeeming qualities he might have had counted for naught. The sin of heresy eclipsed all contradictory, personal characteristics, just as the teachings of God and the Church eclipsed all contradictory empirical observations. The disease called “mental illness”—and its subspecies “homosexuality”—plays the same role today.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 166.

God, Age, Strong, Personality

“It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living.
I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization — namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases.
Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Conclusions.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

Problem, Study, Personality

“I recommend that you provide the resources to carry forward, with full vigor, the great health and education programs that you enacted into law last year. I recommend that we prosecute with vigor and determination our war on poverty. I recommend that you give a new and daring direction to our foreign aid program, designed to make a maximum attack on hunger and disease and ignorance in those countries that are determined to help themselves, and to help those nations that are trying to control population growth. I recommend that you make it possible to expand trade between the United States and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I recommend to you a program to rebuild completely, on a scale never before attempted, entire central and slum areas of several of our cities in America. I recommend that you attack the wasteful and degrading poisoning of our rivers, and, as the cornerstone of this effort, clean completely entire large river basins. I recommend that you meet the growing menace of crime in the streets by building up law enforcement and by revitalizing the entire federal system from prevention to probation. I recommend that you take additional steps to insure equal justice to all of our people by effectively enforcing nondiscrimination in federal and state jury selection, by making it a serious federal crime to obstruct public and private efforts to secure civil rights, and by outlawing discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. I recommend that you help me modernize and streamline the federal government by creating a new Cabinet-level Department of Transportation and reorganizing several existing agencies. In turn, I will restructure our civil service in the top grades so that men and women can easily be assigned to jobs where they are most needed, and ability will be both required as well as rewarded. I will ask you to make it possible for members of the House of Representatives to work more effectively in the service of the nation through a constitutional amendment extending the term of a Congressman to four years, concurrent with that of the President. Because of Vietnam we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do. We will ruthlessly attack waste and inefficiency. We will make sure that every dollar is spent with the thrift and with the commonsense which recognizes how hard the taxpayer worked in order to earn it. We will continue to meet the needs of our people by continuing to develop the Great Society. Last year alone the wealth that we produced increased $47 billion, and it will soar again this year to a total over $720 billion. Because our economic policies have produced rising revenues, if you approve every program that I recommend tonight, our total budget deficit will be one of the lowest in many years. It will be only $1.8 billion next year. Total spending in the administrative budget will be $112.8 billion. Revenues next year will be $111 billion. On a cash basis—which is the way that you and I keep our family budget—the federal budget next year will actually show a surplus. That is to say, if we include all the money that your government will take in and all the money that your government will spend, your government next year will collect one-half billion dollars more than it will spend in the year 1967. I have not come here tonight to ask for pleasant luxuries or for idle pleasures. I have come here to recommend that you, the representatives of the richest nation on earth, you, the elected servants of a people who live in abundance unmatched on this globe, you bring the most urgent decencies of life to all of your fellow Americans.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Women, Men, Money

“Our ills are worse than at their ease
These blameless happy souls suspect,
They only study the disease,
Alas, who live not to detect.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

In the Depths http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/depths.html, st. 3.

Soul, Study, Happiness

“Disease does not recognize congressional districts or party affiliation.”

Steve Kagen (1949) American politician

[27 June 2007, http://www.vote-smart.org/speech_detail.php?sc_id=299749&keyword=&phrase=&contain=, "Kagen Introduces Bill To Save Wisconsin Family Medical Training", Public Statements, Project Vote Smart, 2007-07-21]
Healthcare

“That summer I was nominated to go to the Team Birkie ski camp for the best high school cross-country skiers in the state. … The camp served vegetable lasagna, all kinds of salads, and freshly baked whole wheat bread. … I didn't have any choice, so I ate it all. And I couldn't believe how good it tasted! What was even more amazing was how great I felt. I trained more, and more often, at that camp than I ever had before. And I had never felt better, stronger. I suspected that what I was eating had something to do with how I was feeling, but it wasn't until years later, when I began to study the connection between diet and exercise, nutrition and health, that I learned the importance of diet for everyone — not just athletes. I would learn that a plant-based diet meant more fiber, which sped food through the digestive tract, minimizing the impact of toxins. The same diet also meant more vitamins and minerals; more substances like lycopene, lutein, and beta carotene, which helps protect against chronic disease. And it would mean less refined carbohydrates and trans fats, both implicated in heart disease and other ailments.”

Scott Jurek (1973) American ultramarthon runner

Source: Eat and Run (2012), Ch. 4, pp. 31-32

Health, School, Food, Feeling

“Melancholy
Is not, as you conceive, indisposition
Of body, but the mind's disease.”

John Ford (dramatist) (1586–1639) dramatist

Act III, sc. i.
The Lover's Melancholy (1628)

“You live in a land that is compassionate and decent. Because we believe in the rights and dignity of our own citizenry, we are committed to defending the rights and dignity of people everywhere. America has liberated millions around the world from tyranny and terror. We’ve helped turn the tide against deadly disease in places like Africa. In our hearts we believe all are created equal under God. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is Almighty God’s gift to humanity. At home, there are thousands of platoons in the Army of compassion working to honor those beliefs. No matter what your career path, enlist. When you help another, you enrich your heart, and you strengthen the fabric of our collective goodness. Many of you have already made service a priority in your lives by volunteering during winter, spring, and summer breaks; and completing more than one-hundred community projects through Engaged Learning. I thank you for recognizing the timeless truth: of those to whom much is given, much is required.”

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

2010s, 2015, Remarks at the SMU 100th Spring Commencement (May 2015)

God, People, Truth, World

“For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia — and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again — work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite — ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

"Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" in The Forerunner (October 1913) http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html

Life, Faith, Hope, Home

“[20th Century has been called] the century of extremes, […] in which human vices reached unfathomable depths. [She notes that it has been] a century of great progress [and in some places of] unprecedented economic growth. [At the same time, however, poor urban areas face a bleak future of] overcrowding and a disease pattern linked to poverty and an unhealthy environment.”

Gro Harlem Brundtland (1939) Norwegian politician

Awake! magazine 1999, 12/8, article: The Most Profound Changes.

Time, Future

“The central question about vegetarian diets used to be whether it was healthy to eliminate meat and other animal foods … Now, however, the main question has become whether it is healthier to be a vegetarian than to be a meat eater. … The answer to both questions, based on currently available evidence, seems to be yes. A properly planned vegetarian diet can provide all the essential nutrients, even for growing children … And, on the whole, vegetarians are less likely to be afflicted with the chronic diseases that are leading killers and cripplers in societies where meat is the centerpiece of the diet.”

Jane E. Brody (1941) American writer

"Personal Health; New Research on the Vegetarian Diet", in The New York Times (12 October 1983) http://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/12/garden/personal-health-new-research-on-the-vegetarian-diet.html

Children, Food, Question, Affliction

“Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases…but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 4, member 2, subsection 1, Purging Simples upward.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part II

Men, Health, Soul

“Ionizing radiation has always been with us and will be for all foreseeable time. Our genetic system is probably well adjusted by natural selection to normal background radiation. Added radiation will increase the frequency of mutations; most of these will be harmful. Exposure to radiation in large amounts will increase malignant disease; small amounts may possibly do the same. In view of these potentially harmful effects every reasonable effort should be made to reduce the levels of ionizing radiation to which man is exposed to to the lowest levels that can reasonably be attained.”

George Beadle

in Scientific American, September 1959

Nature, Effort, Time

“This culling poem is a blessing. Why do you think it was created in the first place? It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we're headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war, from all the places we're headed.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Lullaby (2002)

Death, War, People, Thinking

“Next morning the sun revealed a horrid spectacle on the vast plain south of PAnipat. On the actual field of the combat thirty-one distinct heaps of the slain were counted, the number of bodies in each ranging from 500 upwards to 1000 and in four up to 1500 a rough total of 28,000. In addition to these, the ditch round the Maratha camp was full of dead bodies, partly the victims of disease and famine during the long siege and partly wounded men who had crawled out of the fighting to die there. West and south of PAnipat city, the jungle and the road in the line of MarAtha retreat were littered with the remains of those who had fallen unresisting in the relentless DurrAni pursuit or from hunger and exhaustion. Their number - probably three-fourths non-combatants and one-fourth soldiers - could not have been far short of the vast total of those slain in the battlefield. 'The hundreds who lay down wounded, perished from the severity of the cold.'….
'After the havoc of combat followed massacre in cold blood. Several hundreds of MarAthas had hidden themselves in the hostile city of PAnipat through folly or helplessness; and these were hunted out next day and put to the sword. According to one plausible account, the sons of Abdus Samad Khan and Mian Qutb received the DurrAni king's permission to avenge their father's death by an indiscriminate massacre of the MarAthas for one day, and in this way nearly nine thousand men perished; these were evidently non-combatants. The eyewitness Kashiraj Pandit thus describes the scene: 'Every Durrani soldier brought away a hundred or two of prisoners and slew them in the outskirts of their camp, crying out, When I started from our country, my mother, father, sister and wife told me to slay so may kafirs for their sake after we had gained the victory in this holy war, so that the religious merit of this act [of infidel slaying] might accrue to them. In this way, thousands of soldiers and other persons were massacred. In the Shah's camp, except the quarters of himself and his nobles, every tent had a heap of severed heads before it. One may say that it was verily doomsday for the MarAtha people.'….
The booty captured within the entrenchment was beyond calculation and the regiments of Khans [i. e. 8000 troopers of AbdAli clansmen] did not, as far as possible, allow other troops like the IrAnis and the TurAnis to share in the plunder; they took possession of everything themselves, but sold to the Indian soldiers handsome Brahman women for one tuman and good horses for two tumans each.' The Deccani prisoners, male and female reduced to slavery by the victorious army numbered 22,000, many of them being the sons and other relatives of the sardArs or middle class men. Among them 'rose-limbed slave girls' are mentioned.' Besides these 22,000 unhappy captives, some four hundred officers and 6000 men fled for refuge to ShujA-ud-daulah's camp, and were sent back to the Deccan with monetary help by that nawab, at the request of his Hindu officers. The total loss of the MarAthas after the battle is put at 50,000 horses, captured either by the AfghAn army or the villagers along the route of flight, two hundred thousand draught cattle, some thousands of camels, five hundred elephants, besides cash and jewellery. 'Every trooper of the Shah brought away ten, and sometimes twenty camels laden with money. The captured horses were beyond count but none of them was of value; they came like droves of sheep in their thousands.”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Volume II, Fourth Edition, New Delhi, 1991, p.210-11

Death, Women, Men, Money

“Medical opinions differed as to the cause of this "humor" disease.”

Raymond Smullyan (1919–2017) American mathematician

Planet Without Laughter (1980) http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/smullyan.html

“In my creation/evolution ministry, I say there are only two philosophies of health and medicine; creation and evolution. If evolution is true, your body's a collection of chemicals that got together by chance over billions of years, so you treat diseases by adding more chemicals. That's the whole philosophy behind the drug therapy; you have a pain? Take a pill. The other, totally different philosophy is "hey, you're created by God, and he designed the food, and the herbs (Psalm 104:14)."”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

The herbs are for the service of man, and so you treat, or you prevent problems with what you eat. Dr. Kent Hovind Intro to Mary Tocco's info on the dangers of Vaccinations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BJvPcHGFGI, Youtube (April 9, 2016)

God, Pain, Health, Food

“Every physician almost hath his favorite disease.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Book II, Ch. 9
The History of Tom Jones (1749)

“The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Newsmaker: Torvalds: A Solaris skeptic, CNet, 2004-12-21, Shankland, Stephen, 2006-08-28, http://archive.is/EfHH, 2012-07-12 http://news.com.com/Torvalds+A+Solaris+skeptic/2008-1082_3-5498799.html, 2000s, 2000-04

“Christ's gospel could never have been delivered by one who was diseased.”

John McClellan Holmes (1834–1911) US Christian minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 299.

Christ

“He indicated the pair of grotesques. "For instance, I have seldom seen objects so studiously repulsive as this pair of bibelots. Skillfully done, agreed! Notice the detail in these horrid little ears! The snouts, the fangs: the malignance is almost real! Still, they are undeniably the work of a diseased imagination."
The objects reared erect. One of them spoke in a rasping voice: "No doubt Cugel has good reason for his unkind words; still, neither Gark nor I can take them lightly."”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), Cugel's Saga (1983), Chapter 1, section 1, "Flutic"

Imagination

“In the history of medicine, there are few instances in which a disease has been more accurately, more graphically or more briefly described.”

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

In reference to "On Chorea" (1872) by George Huntington on what is now known as Huntington's Disease, as quoted in "Huntington's Chorea" by Irwin A. Brody and Robert H. Wilkins in Archives of Neurology Vol. 17, No. 3 (1967). The acclaim Huntington received for this paper, his first, from Osler and others, he would later refer to as an "unsought, unlooked for honor."

History

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

Clive Staples Lewis book God in the Dock

"The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949), p. 292
Similar statements were included in "A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946) (see above), published posthumously.
God in the Dock (1970)

Age, Exercises, Hell, Sleep

“Thanks to the doctrine of national environment which Owen was the first to preach — Knowledge is greater; Life is longer; Health is surer; Disease is limited; Towns are sweeter; Hours of labour are shorter; Men are stronger; Women are fairer; Children are happier; Industry is held in more honour, and is better rewarded; Co-operation carries wholesome food and increased income into a million homes where they were unknown before, and has brought us nearer and nearer to that state of society which Owen strove to create — in which it shall be impossible for men to be depraved or poor.”

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

Memorial dedication (1902)

Life, Women, Men, Children

“Heroes. They sprang up around him like weeds. A carrier, he was seemingly unable to catch the disease he spread.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

“Cured yesterday of my disease,
I died last night of my physician.”

Matthew Prior (1664–1721) British diplomat, poet

The Remedy Worse than the Disease (1714).

Night

“Henri Poincaré thought the theory of infinite sets a grave malady and pathologic. "Later generations," he said in 1908, "will regard set theory as a disease from which one has recovered.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

[Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, http://books.google.com/books?id=RNwnUL33epsC&pg=PA203, 1982, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-503085-3, 203]

“I think I’m more committed now. Some things are just serendipitous. My mother had the disease and I got involved with the organization, and then I met this splinter group out of the University of Minnesota Hospital, Dr. Karen Ashe and the team at the Grossman Center (for Memory Research and Care). I became sort of their spokesperson and then I got published. I published a first essay and a second essay and I’m up to my sixth essay. I speak all over the country and sometimes all over the world. It’s grown and blossomed into something that feels right. I’ve had a really good life and a wonderful career. I’ve been comfortable and I’ve been healthy. And I adored my mother. So this is my way to give back.”

Kate Mulgrew (1955) American actress

Catching Up with Kate Mulgrew http://www.startrek.com/article/catching-up-with-kate-mulgrew-part-2 (January 19, 2011)

Life, World, Way, Feeling

“And hereby it comes to passe, that Intemperance, is naturally punished with Diseases; Rashness, with Mischance; Injustice; with Violence of Enemies; Pride, with Ruine; Cowardice, with Oppression; Negligent government of Princes, with Rebellion; and Rebellion with Slaughter.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Second Part, Chapter 31, p. 194
Leviathan (1651)

Nature

“Dementia is not a natural condition that we should expect to “grow into” at any age. Like heart disease, dementia has acquired a patina of normalcy only because so many of those around us succumb to it. But I believe that, like heart disease, it is a distinctly abnormal condition brought about by an abnormal diet.”

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

Source: No More Bull! (2005), Ch. 4: Alzheifer's Disease?, p. 56

Age, Nature, Heart

“Oh yeah
In France a skinny man
Died of a big disease with a little name
By chance his girlfriend came across a needle
And soon she did the same
At home there are seventeen-year-old boys
And their idea of fun
Is being in a gang called The Disciples
High on crack, totin' a machine gun.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Sign o' the Times
Song lyrics, Sign O' the Times (1987)

Home, Boy, Idea, Chance

“Physicians are the cobblers, rather the botchers, of men's bodies; as the one patches our tattered clothes, so the other solders our diseased flesh.”

John Ford (dramatist) (1586–1639) dramatist

Act I, sc. ii.
The Lover's Melancholy (1628)

Men, Clothes

“Today, I would like to provide the American people with an update on the White House transition and our policy plans for the first 100 days. Our transition team is working very smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. Truly great and talented men and women, patriots indeed are being brought in and many will soon be a part of our government, helping us to Make America Great Again. My agenda will be based on a simple core principle: putting America First. Whether it's producing steel, building cars, or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, in our great homeland: America – creating wealth and jobs for American workers. As part of this plan, I've asked my transition team to develop a list of executive actions we can take on day one to restore our laws and bring back our jobs. It's about time. These include the following: On trade, I am going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country. Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores. On energy, I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy – including shale energy and clean coal – creating many millions of high-paying jobs. That's what we want, that's what we've been waiting for. On regulation, I will formulate a rule which says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated, it's so important. On national security, I will ask the Department of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a comprehensive plan to protect America's vital infrastructure from cyber-attacks, and all other form of attacks. On immigration, I will direct the Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker. On ethics reform, as part of our plan to Drain the Swamp, we will impose a five-year ban on executive officials becoming lobbyists after they leave the Administration – and a lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. These are just a few of the steps we will take to reform Washington and rebuild our middle class. I will provide more updates in the coming days, as we work together to Make America Great Again for everyone.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

A Message from President-Elect Donald J. Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX_KaStFT8 (21 November 2016) 2010s, 2016, November

Women, Men, People, Law

“Over the coming months, I'll receive multiple treatments, I'll lose my hair, trim down a bit, but I will not stop working to change Maryland for the better. I'll be working hard, and making the decisions the people of this state elected me to make. … With my faith, family, and friends, I know that I won't just beat this disease but I will be a better and stronger person and governor on the other side.”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

" Full Remarks: Governor Larry Hogan Announces Cancer Diagnosis http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/06/22/full-remarks-governor-larry-hogan-announces-cancer-diagnosis/"(22 June 2015)

People, Family, Faith, Decision

“Our amendment earmarks $10 million out of the account called Army Research, Development, Test and Evaluation. The money would go to a research program administered by the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in the DoD, for identifying the biological mechanisms behind the illnesses — particularly the neurological and immunological ones; the chronic disease effects; better diagnostic criteria for the illnesses; and identification of treatments. The MRMC will design a research plan for that purpose, relying heavily on the expertise outside DoD and the VA. It will be subject to peer review by experts, a significant number of which will be independent of DoD.$10 million will have a large impact on veterans who rely on the government to take care of them after they have taken care of us.I urge my colleagues to support the Kucinich-Shays-Sanders amendment. Vote 'yes' to restore research funding for Gulf War Illnesses.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressional Record (20 June, 2005) http://frwebgate5.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=239772330196+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve.

Money, War, Support

Quotes about diseases page 8

Quotes about diseases
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