All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.
—Jack London, 1912Quotes
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
—Marianne Moore, 1935Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
—Susan Sontag, 1963Everyone who is sick is someone else’s patient zero.
—Leslie Jamison, 2020If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.
—George W. Bush, 2005What timid man does not avoid contact with the sick, fearing lest he contract a disease so near?
—Ovid, c. 10Diseases, at least many of them, are like human beings. They are born, they flourish, and they die.
—David Riesman, 1937The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
—Agnes Repplier, 1929We should always presume the disease to be curable until its own nature proves it otherwise.
—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.
—Muhammad, c. 630Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.
—Robert P. Hudson, 1983I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902’Tis the destroyer, or the devil, that scatters plagues about the world.
—Cotton Mather, 1693