Quotes about diagnosis

A collection of quotes on the topic of diagnosis, likeness, disease, doing.

Quotes about diagnosis

Marshall B. Rosenberg photo
Sharon M. Draper photo
Otto Dix photo

“My nerves fell apart before I saw the front this time, the decaying corpses and piercing wire; for a while, they made me harmless, locking me up in order to undertake a special diagnosis of whatever military ability I might still have. The nerves, every last fiber, repugnance, repulsion!”

Otto Dix (1891–1969) German painter and printmaker

Quote in Dix' letter from Görden 1917, to his brother-in-law, Otto Schmalhausen; as cited in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 248

Augusten Burroughs photo

“He was raised without a proper diagnosis.”

Source: Running with Scissors

Tim Burton photo

“My diagnosis," he said
"for better or worse,
is that your son is the result
of an old pharaoh's curse.”

Tim Burton (1958) American filmmaker

Source: The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories

Aimee Friedman photo

“Summer-induced stupidity.

That was the diagnosis…”

Aimee Friedman (1979) American writer

Source: Sea Change

Alfred de Zayas photo

“The diagnosis is clear, but changing the status quo has proven difficult, because often those who are elected do not govern, and those who do govern are not elected.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 2013 Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order
2013

Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell photo

“The higher commander who goes to Field Service Regulations for tactical guidance inspires about as much confidence as the doctor who turns to a medical dictionary for his diagnosis.”

Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell (1883–1950) senior officer of the British Army

III – The Soldier and the Statesman.
"Generals and Generalship" (1939)

Karl Kraus photo

“One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

“Diagnosis is all too frequently an attempt to cram a whole live struggling client into a nosological category.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

Source: The Psychology of Personal Constructs, 1955, p. 775

Johnny Cash photo
John W. Gardner photo

“Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.”

John W. Gardner (1912–2002) American politician

"A Nation Is Never Finished", ABA Journal (November 1967), Volume 53, page 1011.

Boris Sidis photo

“The recognition, the diagnosis, and the preservation of psychopathic individuals account for the apparent increase of neurotics in civilized communities.”

Boris Sidis (1867–1923) American psychiatrist

Source: Nervous Ills their Cause and Cure (1922), p. 275

Adrian Slywotzky photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Naomi Klein photo
H.L. Mencken photo

“My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

Christopher Hitchens photo
John Gray photo

“In Leopardi’s view, the universal claims of Christianity were a licence for universal savagery. Because it is directed to all of humanity, the Christian religion is usually praised, even by its critics, as an advance on Judaism. Leopardi – like Freud a hundred years later – did not share this view. The crimes of medieval Christendom were worse than those of antiquity, he believed, precisely because they could be defended as applying universal principles: the villainy introduced into the world by Christianity was ‘entirely new and more terrible … more horrible and more barbarous than that of antiquity’. Modern rationalism renews the central error of Christianity – the claim to have revealed the good life for all of humankind. Leopardi described the secular creeds that emerged in modern times as expressions of ‘half-philosophy’, a type of thinking with many of the defects of religion. What Leopardi called ‘the barbarism of reason’ – the project of remaking the world on a more rational model – was the militant evangelism of Christianity in a more dangerous form. Events have confirmed Leopardi’s diagnosis. As Christianity has waned, the intolerance it bequeathed to the world has only grown more destructive. From imperialism through communism and incessant wars launched to promote democracy and human rights, the most barbarous forms of violence have been promoted as means to a higher civilization.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: Leopardi and the Souls of Machines (p.32-3)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Michael Marmot photo
Frederik Pohl photo
Karen Armstrong photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo

“Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Alfred P. Sloan, quoted in: The Almanac of Quotable Quotes from 1990. (1991), p. 103

Philip K. Dick photo
Rebecca Solnit photo
Eric Hoffer photo
Warren Farrell photo
N. Gregory Mankiw photo
Peter Mere Latham photo

“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

Charlotte Salomon photo

“Daberlohn's diagnosis [about the etching she made as his portrait] holds encouragement for Charlotte…. Daberlohn (in his letter) 'In my opinion you are destined to create something above average.'
….'Above average.' She is elated by his letter and really feels quite proud… While beginning to paint the buttercup-strewn meadow where she happens to be sitting, she decides to make his prophecy come true and actually create something 'above average'.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

written text with brush, in her paintings JHM no. 4599 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004599/part/character/theme/keyword/M004599 + 4600 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004600/part/character/theme/keyword/M004600: in 'Life? or Theater..', p. 482-483
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Thomas Szasz photo
Richard Rumelt photo

“The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 7

James K. Morrow photo

“My own preliminary diagnosis is that I am out of my skull and getting farther from its vicinity every day.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

"Diary of a Mad Deity" p. 191 (originally published in Synergy: New Science Fiction, Number 2, edited by George Zebrowski)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Thomas Szasz photo
H. Havelock Ellis photo

“Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice.”

Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962) American university teacher (1879-1962)

Fischerisms (1944)

Paul Krugman photo
Charles Stross photo
Ta-Nehisi Coates photo
Carl Schmitt photo
June Downey photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo

“The business of the Aquarian Conspiracy is calm diagnosis of that illness—to make it clear that synthesis is needed—paradigm change rather than pendulum change.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Nine, Flying and Seeing: New Ways to Learn

Rush Limbaugh photo