Archive

Quotes

The best quarantine is hygiene.

—Richard D. Arnold, 1871

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

—Samuel Johnson, 1750

Death from the bubonic plague is rated, with crucifixion, among the nastiest human experiences of all.

—Guy R. Williams, 1975

If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.

—George W. Bush, 2005

’Tis the destroyer, or the devil, that scatters plagues about the world.

—Cotton Mather, 1693

Hygienic law, like martial law, supersedes rights in crises.

—Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1913

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

In times of pestilence, gaiety and joyousness are most profitable.

—Jacme d’Agramont, 1348

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

—Muhammad, c. 630

Everyone who is sick is someone else’s patient zero.

—Leslie Jamison, 2020

If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.

—Anton Chekhov, 1904

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

—Susan Sontag, 1963

All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.

—Jack London, 1912