Quotes about diagnosis

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

Quotes about diagnosis

“Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.”

Marshall B. Rosenberg (1934–2015) American psychologist

Anger

“Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

“[A] person is so much more than the name of a diagnosis on a chart.”

Sharon M. Draper book Out of My Mind

Source: Out of My Mind

Personality

“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

Time

“He was raised without a proper diagnosis.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“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

“Summer-induced stupidity.

That was the diagnosis…”

Aimee Friedman (1979) American writer

Source: Sea Change

Stupidity, Summer

“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

Change

“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)

Confidence

“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)

Disease

“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

“Cash: I went into a coma and I was there for 12 days. They all thought I was dying and they couldn't diagnose what was wrong with me. They finally came up with a diagnosis of Shy-Drager syndrome. It was few months later they realized I didn't have that so it was Parkinson's. And then it was not that. Then finally it was autonomic neuropathy. … And I'm pretty well resolved to the fact that that's what it is. And it's a slow process of the nerve endings.
King: No cure?
Cash: No, I don't think so. But that's all right. There's no cure for life either.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

CNN interview (2002)

Life, Thinking

“As we turn over the pages of nineteenth century literature, we are constantly confronted with the question of alienation. Baudelaire, Marx, Kierkegaard, Chateaubriand, Cardinal Newman — it does not matter whether the voice comes from the Left or the Right; all are agreed in their rejection of the values of the prevailing ethic. Yet we never get a clear definition of alienation: what is man alienated from, and why? Perhaps it is precisely the democratic society, the growing affluence and education, that have revealed the natural state of man — much as the development of medicine has enabled greater accuracy of diagnosis, with the resultant tremendous increase in the record of certain diseases. Perhaps the discovery of human self-alienation was simply a statistical refinement made possible by the spread of the privileges of culture to the middle classes.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Gustave Flaubert: A Sentimental Education (p. 187)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Education, Disease, Literature, Question

“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.

World

“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

Communication

“Doctors, chess grand masters and football quarterbacks share a trait: the ability to recognize patterns and learn from them. A doctor can connect symptoms to causes and use that to make a diagnosis and offer a prescription. Top quarterbacks and grand masters can sense the shape of unfolding play, and profit from that knowledge.
Great managers are also skilled at pattern recognition. Every industry is reshaped by patterns of strategic change that can dramatically shift profit and power.”

Adrian Slywotzky (1951) American economist

Source: Profit Patterns (1999), p. 2.

Knowledge, Sense, Learning, Change

“These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.”

Sylvia Plath book Crossing the Water

"Stillborn" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/still.html <br class="br">Crossing the Water (1971)

Love, People, Sadness

“Information practice… consists of two activities that we may call diagnosis and prevention. Diagnosis is identifying what is the most probable information need of a user in a particular state of information want. Provision is deciding what action is most likely to meet that need. Information science seeks to understand the potential range of user situations giving rise to information want and needs; to develop methods of identifying the actual information needed; to understand and expand the range of possible ways of satisfying information need; and to develop methods of deciding what way is most likely to be effective in a particular case.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxii-xxiii; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Way, Understanding, Science

“In spite of mistakes, faulty diagnosis and much error, humanity cannot do without its doctors, its surgeons, and its hospitals. They are urgently needed, and will be for centuries to come…”

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

Source: Esoteric Healing (1953), p. 481

Error

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. … We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. … It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.”

Naomi Klein book This Changes Everything

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), p. 18
This Changes Everything

Communication, Decision, Chance

“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)

Business

“In either event he could only adhere to the letter of the law, but then for every yea in the law there was a nay, and it always boiled down to simple expediency. Like a psychiatric diagnosis, it could always be juggled around to fit anything you chose.”

Mark Clifton book They'd Rather Be Right

Source: They'd Rather Be Right (1954), p. 79.

Law

“The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"The 'We' Fallacy" (1988).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Fear, Thinking

“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)

Life, War, World, Religion

“When people would come in with non-specific problems and we never quite got to the root of a medical diagnosis, it always seemed to me they were expressing problems in living, and that one needed to look at their problems in living, and how they manifested themselves in physical problems.”

Michael Marmot (1945) Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health

Interview, 18 March 2002

People, Problem

“She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 11, “Dorothy Louise Mintz Torraway as Penelope” (p. 146)

Joy, Happiness

“We now open our eyes, we see the explosion, we understand the confusion and its causes, we have an exact diagnosis of our disease and we can begin the therapy, not by nervous and uncoordinated magical solutions, but by properly conceiving and trying to build the Entopia we badly need.”

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (1914–1975) Greek architect

Epilogue, p. 308
Building Entopia - 1975

Disease, Understanding

“Newton and Descartes started to try and prove that God existed in the same way as they would try and prove something in the laboratory or with their mathematics … And when you try and mix science and religion you get bad science and bad religion. The two are doing two different things. … Science can give you a diagnosis of cancer. It can even cure your disease, but it cannot touch your grief and disappointment, nor can it help you to die well.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Ode interview (2009)

God, Disease, Religion, Disappointment

“The irony is that the healthier Western society becomes, the more medicine it craves… Immense pressures are created – by the medical profession, by the media, by the high pressure advertising of pharmaceutical companies to expand the diagnosis of treatable illnesses. Scares are created, people are bamboozled into lab tests, often of dubious reliability. Thanks to diagnostic creep or leap, ever more disorders are revealed, extensive and expensive treatments are then urged … [This] is endemic to a system in which an expanding medical establishment, faced with a healthier population, is driven to medicalising normal events, converting risks into diseases and treating trivial complaints with fancy procedures… The law of diminishing returns necessarily applies. Extending life becomes feasible, but it may be a life exposed to degrading neglect as resources grow overstretched. What an ignominious destiny if the future of medicine turns into bestowing meagre increments of unenjoyed life?”

Roy Porter (1946–2002) British historian

Roy Porter as cited in: " The cost of chronic disease and the lack of NHS reform http://abetternhs.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-cost/" at abetternhs.wordpress.com. Posted on May 16, 2011

Life, People, Disease, Law

“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

“A rolling stone gathers no moss.'
Try as I might I could not remember the meaning. At last I hazarded, 'Well, it means a person who's always active and never pauses to reflect — ' No, that didn't sound right. I tried again. 'That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral stature won't grow stale.' He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, 'I mean, a man who's active and doesn't let grass grow under his feet, he'll get ahead in life.'
Doctor Nisea said, 'I see.' And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder.
'What does it mean?' I asked. 'Did I get it backward?'
'Yes, I'm afraid so. The generally-accepted meaning of the proverb is the opposite of what you've given; it is generally taken to mean that a person who — '
'You don't have to tell me,' I broke in. 'I remember — I really knew it. A person who's unstable will never acquire anything of value.”

Philip K. Dick book We Can Build You

Source: We Can Build You (1972), chapter 17, page 224.

Life, Way, Thinking, Grass

“… It’s hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instability: disappearing mothers, the vast gap between the medieval Russian-Polish Pale and glittering amnesiac Los Angeles, the three or four languages she left behind and the English she never completely acquired, the annihilation of the world she came from and of the relatives she left behind. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an alternate diagnosis a therapist once proffered for her behavior, a condition that recognized all the kinds of war she survived and a world in which nothing was too far-fetched or terrible to be possible.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Pain, War, World, Angels

“To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews, and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 126
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“When she’d been with us a month or so, Lisa Cody got a diagnosis. She was a sociopath too. She was happy, because she wanted to be like Lisa in all things. Lisa was not so happy, because she had been the only sociopath among us. “We are very rare,” she told me once, “and mostly we are men.””

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

Men, Happiness

“Because psychoanalysis emerged as a medical specialty concerned with the healing of the sick, it focused its attention on the pathological processes arising from the disruption of the adaptive capacities, and this subject matter was taken to be the totality of significant information concerning the structure of the personality. The diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is, however, a poor basis for the empiricism which a basic science requires. Mental illness, when it is seen in terms of the symptoms and syndromes which come to the attention of the psychotherapist, presents a picture of the personality which is readily fragmented and distorted out of proportion.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

8. Psychotherapy and Social Welfare
Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity (1966)

Science, Personality

“The reporting of depression is often associated with the dependency of women on men. But it is dependency on men successful enough to allow a woman the time to think about more than survival. Which is why, when we think about women who report depression, we think of middle-class women, not working-class women. The working-class woman is too worried about survival to report depression. Depression is a diagnosis that tends to increase among those with the luxury of worrying about something other than survival. The more a person is in Stage II, the more that person can afford to focus on depression.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 177.

Women, Men, Thinking, Time

“Now we must remember that there is no Orion's belt in the sky. There is only a collection of stars that appear to us, once they are pointed out, to resemble what we imagine Orion's belt to have been. But there is no more relationship between the stars comprising the belt than there is between all the stars in the universe. The only relationship is that which we have created in our own fantasy. A medical diagnosis is like Orion's belt. It doesn't really exist. It is just putting together a few easily observed findings that seem to have some special relationship. But when we do this, we ignore all the thousands of other findings that are really just as equally related and equally important in the whole universe of the patient.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: Facets of a Diamond: Reflections of a Healer (2002), p. 15

Imagination, Star, Universe, Appearance

“If you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes. Although Keynes died more than a half-century ago, his diagnosis of recessions and depressions remains the foundation of modern macroeconomics. His insights go a long way toward explaining the challenges we now confront.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

N. Gregory Mankiw, "What Would Keynes Have Done?" in New York Times (November 28, 2008).
2000s -

Way, Understanding, 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

Disease

“Men are the dominant sign-using animals. Animals other than man do, of course, respond to certain things as signs of something else, but such signs do not attain the complexity and elaboration which is found in human speech, writing, art, testing devices, medical diagnosis, and signaling instruments. Science and signs are inseparably interconnected, since science both presents men with more reliable signs and embodies its results is systems of signs. Human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs - if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 1 (1971:17), Lead paragraph first chapter

Men, Art, Science, Animals

“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 <br class="br">Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Feeling, Painting

“I became interested in writing this book approximately ten years ago when, having become established as a psychiatrist, I became increasingly impressed by the vague, capricious and generally unsatisfactory character of the widely used concept of mental illness and its corollaries, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.
Although (mental illness) might have been a useful concept in the nineteenth century, today it is scientifically worthless and socially harmful.
In non-psychiatric circles mental illness all too often is considered to be whatever psychiatrists say it is. The answer to the question, Who is mentally ill? thus becomes: Those who are confined in mental hospitals or who consult psychiatrists in their private offices.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Preface to the First Edition.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

Books, Question

“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

“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)

“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)

Disease, Problem, Study, Personality