Archive

Quotes

The sick man is the parasite of society.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

—Samuel Johnson, 1750

’Tis a portentous sign / When a man sweats and at the same time shivers.

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

It is strange indeed that the more we learn about how to build health, the less healthy Americans become.

—Adelle Davis, 1951

Health in all lands is among the indispensable guarantees of human progress.

—Helen Keller, 1936

The best quarantine is hygiene.

—Richard D. Arnold, 1871

Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960

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

Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.

—Richard Krause, 1982

Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.

—Robert P. Hudson, 1983

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

—Guy R. Williams, 1975

Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.

—Hans Zinsser, 1935