Archive

Quotes

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

—Anton Chekhov, 1904

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

—Helen Keller, 1936

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

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

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

—Charles Lamb, 1833

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

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

—Thomas Mann, 1924

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

—Robert P. Hudson, 1983

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

—Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1913

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

—Guy R. Williams, 1975

Health can make money, but money cannot make health.

—Maria Edgeworth, 1833

I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830

The sick man is the parasite of society.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889