
“There is an urgency to create vaccines for diseases which don't make money.”
House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Hearing on Coronavirus (March 5, 2020)
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Pantagruel (1532), Chapter 16.
“There is an urgency to create vaccines for diseases which don't make money.”
House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Hearing on Coronavirus (March 5, 2020)
All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism (2001)
“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 14
Context: What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'
I reject that entirely. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.
Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: A variation of the "photographic" effect of language consists of how blurred the photograph is. "Blurring" occurs as a result of general class names, rendering distinctions among members of the class less visible. One of the most common manifestations of the lack of this kind of semantic awareness can be found in what is called "prejudice": a response to an individual is predetermined because the name of the class in which the person is included is prejudiced negatively. The most obvious and ordinary remark made in cases of this kind, "They are all alike," makes the point clear.
“I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.”
An Englishman Abroad (1983).