Quotes about measles

A collection of quotes on the topic of measles, likeness, love, life.

Quotes about measles

“Today, the Princess Royal has been canonized as a secular saint, for her truly admirable international work on behalf of the Save the Children Fund. Her dedication and concern are beyond doubt, but she didn't catch them like measles.”

Anne, Princess Royal (1950) daughter of Elizabeth II

Bernard Levin, "Uneasy Lies the Head", The Times, 23 January 1989.
About

Children, Princess

“Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

"On Being in Love".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)
Context: Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once... No, we never sicken with love twice. Cupid spends no second arrow on the same heart.

Love, Moving On

“Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Love, Life

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

When asked by Viereck if he considered himself to be a German or a Jew. A version with slightly different wording is quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe http://books.google.com/books?id=dJMpQagbz_gC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA386#v=onepage&q&f=false by Walter Isaacson (2007), p. 386 <br class="br">1920s, Viereck interview (1929) <br class="br">Variant: Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. <br class="br">Context: It is quite possible to be both. I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

Disease

“White blood cells and other cells of ours actively seek out and kill foreign microbes. The specific antibodies that we gradually build up against a particular microbe infecting us make us less likely to get reinfected once we become cured. As we all know from experience, there are some illnesses, such as flu and the common cold, to which our resistance is only temporary; we can eventually contract the illness again. Against other illnesses, though—including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox — our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity. That's the principle of vaccination: to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe.”

Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), p. 200

Disease, Dead

“Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Adventures of Sally

The Adventures of Sally (1922)

Life

“Love is like the measles; we can't have it bad but once, and the later in life we have it the tougher it goes with us.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Affurisms. From Josh Billings: His Sayings (1865)

Love, Life

“…But love is like the measles; the later in life it affects you, the more severe the consequences"
"Is there anything you can take for it?”

Len Deighton book Charity

"Only wedding vows"
Charity (1997; Harper Paperback, p. 280)

Love, Life, Wedding

“The tragedy happens—yesterday at a school in Oregon, and then as it will again—exactly as predicted, and uniquely here. It hardly seems worth the energy to once again make the same essential point that the President—his growing exasperation and disbelief moving, if not effective, as he serves as national mourner—has now made again: we know how to fix this. Gun control ends gun violence as surely an antibiotics end bacterial infections, as surely as vaccines end childhood measles—not perfectly and in every case, but overwhelmingly and everywhere that it’s been taken seriously and tried at length. These lives can be saved. Kids continue to die en masse because one political party won’t allow that to change, and the party won’t allow it to change because of the irrational and often paranoid fixations that make the massacre of students and children an acceptable cost of fetishizing guns.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

The Second Amendment Is a Gun-Control Amendment, The New Yorker (2015)

Children, School, Change, Childhood

“These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Chapter Four.

Way, Reading

“Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant — if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the lightbulbs.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955)

Beauty, Angels, Home, Baby

“Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce…Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring…
I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill…never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence…As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.
At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 53-54)

Men, People, World, Hope

“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

Disease, History

“Stupefied parents must be persuaded that by not vaccinating their children they harm these children and the enitre society. Because, as a significant part of society will not become resistant to a given pathogen, there is a chance that an epidemic will occur. Now, for example, measles returns. Completely harmless in childhood (in my time all children went through it and nothing bad happened), can lead to very serious complications in adult patients.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Mazurek, Maria (7 July 2017): Cudowna armia, która broni naszego ciała http://plus.gazetakrakowska.pl/magazyn/a/cudowna-armia-ktora-broni-naszego-ciala,12271571. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

Children, Parent, Chance, Time

“Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Love