Disease Quotes

“Another new and groundbreaking story in FDR Unmasked is about his highly consequential friendship with Vincent Astor, the closest with any man in his adult life. To truly understand the “real” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one behind his mask of deception, it is important to understand their almost brotherly relationship.”
― Steven Lomazow, FDR Unmasked: 73 Years of Medical Cover-ups That Rewrote History

“Pathogens thrive on inequality and injustice.”
― Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

“There is one universally incorrect choice: do nothing. This didn't work when humans thought that plagues were a punishment sent by angry gods. Nor does a laissez-faire approach help stop disease when it is a deliberate policy choice.”
― Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

“The Hospital for Infectious Diseases...The only people who lived here were those who made resistance to germs their only reason for being. Unceasing approbation of life; a rough, rude approbation that did not care at all about appearances. An approbation of life beyond law and beyond morality, dramatized and incessantly demanded by delirium, incontinence, bloody excrement, vomit, diarrhea, and horrible odors. This air which, like a mob of merchants hosting bids at a produce auction, craved in every second the call: "Still alive! Still alive!"...This mass off active bodies, unified by the unique form of existence they bore, namely, contagious disease. Here the value of men's lives and germ's lives frequently came to the same thing; patient and practitioner were metamorphosed into bacteria - into such objectless life. Here life existed only for the sake of being affirmed; no prettier desire was allowed. Here happiness reigned. In fact, here happiness, that mostly rapidly rotting of all foods, reigned in its most rotten, most inedible form.”
― Yukio Mishima

“Suddenly the world began to wither and blacken, rapidly secreting from itself a hallucinatory dusk that infected all things. The plague of dusk expanded venomously and insidiously in all directions, creeping from one thing to another; whatever it touched at once decayed, blackened and disintegrated into rot. People fled from the dusk in silent panic, but the leprosy soon caught up with them, smearing a dark rash across their foreheads. They lost their faces, which fell away in great, shapeless stains, and so they went on, without features, without eyes, dropping mask after mask along the way, until the dusk teemed with those abandoned larvae, scattered behind them.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“The type medicines that the Prophet SAW and his Companions used to take was nothing like the chemical mixtures that are called Aqrabathayn (pharmacopeia). Rather, the majority of their medicine consisted of only one ingredient. Sometimes, they would take another substance to assist the medicine or make it taste better. This was and still is, the case with most of the medicine used by many cultures such as Arabs, Turks, Indians and nomads.”
― Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, الطب النبوي

“If "love" was what made someone walk into the fray, despite knowing very well that it was wrong - if "love" made them stand by their mistakes, despite knowing full well that they were stepping into a bottomless abyss, to the point they could disregard anything from infamy, scorn, principles, morals, to life itself - then, to him, this seemed less like a type of affection and more like some kind of disease.”
― Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou, Case File Compendium: Bing An Ben, Vol. 1

“Occurrence is normal, persistence isn’t”
― Dr. Anhad Kaur Suri

“What would happen to his self in the moment of complete metamorphosis? When Lewis, the actor, became a great white shark, the character, permanently? Was Lewis's disease an art form?”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“HIV prevalence is an abstraction. the time-lag between infection with HIV and illness with AIDS is so long - eight to ten years - that a new epidemic consists mostly of symptom-less HIV infection rather than visible sickness and death from AIDS”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“there is a missing link. people overwhelmingly acknowledge that there is an AIDS epidemic, but do not take the next step of accepting the consequences. this is familiar territory for those concerned with trying to change risky sexual behaviour: knowledge about how HIV is transmitted and the dangers of certain kinds of practices does not seem to translate into behavioural change.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“in the higher stages of denial, ever-more-complex mechanisms are developed for explaining the unacceptable while maintaining a façade of social and moral normality.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the AIDS pandemic is a disaster with few parallels, because it is so easy to make it invisible or to pretend it is something else. an earthquake, flood or famine is dramatically visible and politically salient, because it affects entire communities in a spectacular fashion, including their leaders and spokespeople. AIDS is more like climate change, an incremental process manifest in a quickening drumbeat of ‘normal’ events.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the most sophisticated form of denial is ‘normalization’. the intolerable becomes ‘no longer news’ and people invest in ‘not having an inquiring mind about these matters’.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the study of socio-political denial is the study of how appearances are kept up, the moral order is sustained, and necessary changes are pressed up into the service of existing interests. this can be seen at the family and community level, and in the way that national and international politics is managed.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“for the women [sex-workers], all poor and competing in an oversupplied market for sexual services, the ‘choice’ of unprotected sex is simply a financial trade-off between less money today (and the threat of physical violence from a dissatisfied client) and the far-off danger of developing AIDS. this has echoes, too, of the risk of a ‘bad reputation’ weighed by women [in the area] who too rarely insist on condom use to protect themselves.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“if spiritual forces operate in a different sphere to the rule of law and human rights, then democratic politics is failing to deal with a fundamental problem in people’s lives and after-lives. the repercussions of AIDS for the moral cosmology are profound indeed. the secular frameworks of epidemiology and public policy will not by themselves be enough to make sense of the virus and epidemic. we need to develop and deploy metaphors that speak to the social world, constructed around moral imaginings which are impacted by AIDS and which in turn constrain social capabilities to respond to AIDS. we should also be alert to the fact that scholars and policy makers themselves are unable to think about the crisis that is AIDS without using language and imagery borrowed from another realm of human experience. how we think about the AIDS epidemic becomes its own reality. yet we must not lose sight of the virus and the disease. (…) AIDS represents the ordinary workings of biology, not an irrational or diabolical plague with moral meaning. HIV transmission is preventable and medication is available that can extend a healthy life for those living with HIV. science can triumph, given resources, policies and the right social and political context.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why there is no Political Crisis - Yet by Waal, Alex de [Zed Books, 2006] ( Paperback ) [Paperback]

“in the run-up to South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, Nelson Mandela was reportedly advised not to make AIDS into a campaign issue for fear of offending culturally conservative constituencies. ‘I wanted to win,’ said Mandela, ‘and I did not talk about AIDS.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“it is from such diverse sources with varied networks and linkages that the response to HIV / AIDS has been patched together. it is an NGO model of response, uneven in coverage and quality, responsive to the particularities of local circumstance, the character of local leaders, and the availability and types of funds available.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the philanthropic NGO has long been decried by the left as a means of addressing only the symptoms of poverty and thus obscuring the political strategies needed to overcome it. NGOs are criticised for creating Potemkin villages not replicable at scale. their limits are often painfully apparent. some are ‘briefcase’ NGOs, to give their founders income or profit.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the Cold War thaw brought a rising tide: a series of waves that swept in and receded, slowly and unevenly bringing new political waterlines”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“As increasing human population and fires from the savannah are continuously eating into the forest belt, it seems likely that the distribution of the forest members of the fusca group will continue to retract. In 1912 Simpson described how G. Fusca was found in Sierra Leone along a certain 37-mile stretch of road which ran through thickly wooded country skirting mountains densely clothed in thick forest; in 1946 I visited the area to find no fusca, but bare mountains, grassland, and only a few patches of low secondary thicket.”
― T. A. M Nash, Africa's bane: the tsetse fly

“Some 200 miles south of Gadau, where the climate is less severe, morsitans still has to vacate log sites in the dry season and breeds in the riverine vegetation of stream-beds together with tachinoides and palpalis. Still farther south, and approaching the forest belt, morsitans breeds under small, deciduous, umbrella-like Gardenia erubescens bushes in the savannah, until the grass fires destroy the leaves when the female larviposits under small thickets of evergreen Combretrum micranthum in eroded, waterless gullies.
This seasonal shifting of the breeding grounds is not confined to West Africa. Recently Glasgow found that in a hot part of Tanzania morsitans breeds under logs in the wet season, but after the fires prefers rot holes in trees, returning to logs when the rains break. Burtt has found that pallipides breeds in the early dry season in deciduous thickets, but moves after the fires to evergreen thicket along the main watercourse. The wet-season site defeated him.
When investigating a strange area, forget past experience; instead, consider the climatic conditions prevailing and the vegetation available, and remember the basic principles. The tsetse is a most adaptable insect: pupae have even been found on the floors of native huts.”
― T. A. M Nash

“It is easy to make a promise to love until death when you are diagnosed with a terminal disease.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“In ballads, love is a disease, an affliction. You contract it as a mortal might contract one of their viruses. Perhaps a touch of hands or a brush of lips, and then it is as though your whole body is fevered and fighting it. But there's no way to prevent it from running its course.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne

“Unforgiveness is the most prolific cause of disease. It will harden arteries or liver, and affect the eye-sight. In its train are endless ills.”
― Florence Scovel-Shinn, The Game of Life and How to Play It

“There are no cures for a body whose environment suffers from prolonged poisoning and malnutrition. The cure for all diseases is your immune system. There are no other truths.”
― Sharky Rich

“I'm thinking about how as a human being
Trump is immune from all the normal inhibiting factors
that cause people to be good, and caring, and careful
(whether because they believe in humanity
or they fear God's wrath).
No self-awareness.
No empathy.
No humility.
No shame.

I'm thinking about how as a society
we can never wholly become immune from diseased minds like his
because if we ever did find a 'perfect' structure,
we would calcify the findings of that moment
and create a new kind of 'originalism'
that could become equally as dangerous
as any other
(the origin story of the United States,
the constitution,
the Bible).

That belief that it was perfect
would itself defeat us.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Evil is an incurable disease, and some people were just born with it - passed down through generations. It's in their DNA”
― Niedria D. Kenny

“In fact, a synergistic relationship existed between the two: slaving raids spread germs and caused deaths; deceased slaves needed to be replaced, and thus their deaths spurred additional raids.”
― Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America