Weekend Words: Disease
As cases of measles escalate, the New York Times reported this week that infectious diseases once believed to be “forever in the country’s rearview mirror” are now returning because ‘too many people are not getting their children vaccinated, out of a conviction that inoculations are risky.”
As cases of measles escalate, the New York Times reported this week that infectious diseases once believed to be “forever in the country’s rearview mirror” are now returning because ‘too many people are not getting their children vaccinated, out of a conviction that inoculations are risky.”
If a lot of cures are suggested for a disease, it means that disease is incurable.
—Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
—Susan Sontag
Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left. Think it over… no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid… antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine.
—Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
—Henry James, letter to H. G. Wells
Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.
—H. G. Wells
Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.
—Mary Baker Eddy
Consciousness is a disease.
—Miguel de Unamuno
Misery is a communicable disease.
—Martha Graham
Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease
—Hippocrates
A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.
—Guy Fawkes
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.
—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
To cure the British disease with Socialism is like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.
—Margaret Thatcher
Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.
—Voltaire
I have Social disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.
—Andy Warhol
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife—
Fly hence, our contact fear!
—Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gypsy”
All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.
—Lenny Bruce
The Muse but served to ease some friend, not wife,
To help me through this long disease, my life.
—Alexander Pope, “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthonot”
