Weekend Words: Contagious
The Ebola epidemic continues unabated.
The Ebola epidemic continues unabated. This week, President Obama concluded his remarks at a high-level United Nations meeting with the pledge:
So I want to thank all of you for the efforts that are made. But I hope that I’m properly communicating a sense of urgency here. Do not stand by, thinking that somehow, because of what we’ve done, that it’s taken care of. It’s not. And if we don’t take care of this now we are going to see fallout effects and secondary effects from this that will have ramifications for a long time, above and beyond the lives that will have been lost.
“There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.”
—Michel de Montaigne
“From watching the news one would think the Iraqis want us out of their country. But an overwhelming majority of Iraqis support our involvement there. Our freedom is contagious and we helped liberate them.”
—Former Senator Jim Bunning
“Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.”
—Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Written by Herself (1861)
“By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
“All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
“Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—”
—William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All”
“Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. … It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.”
—Ambrose Bierce
