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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
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- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962).
- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907).
- 4-Jan-21 - Doing the Numbers, 12/2020 | WIST on “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933).
Quotations about medicine
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Certainty has become a consumer product. It is marketed the world over — by insurance companies, investment advisers, election campaigns, and the medical industry.
To array a man’s will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) American clergyman and orator
Norwood; or, Village Life in New England, Vol. 1, ch. 6 (1867)
(Source)
I know the colour rose, and it is lovely,
But not when it ripens in a tumour;
And healing greens, leaves and grass, so springlike,
In Limbs that fester are not springlike.
Ah, pierce me one hundred times with your needles fine
And I will thank you one hundred times, Saint Morphine,
You who Aesculapius has made a God.[Ah! Perce-moi cent fois de ton aiguille fine
Et je te bénirai cent fois, Sainte Morphine,
Dont Esculape eût fait une divinité.]Jules Verne (1828-1905) French novelist, poet, playwright
“To Morphine [A la morphine]” (1866)
(Source)
A sonnet written while recovering from a leg injured in an attack by his nephew.
Alt. trans.: "Ah! Needle me a hundred times, and, yes, / A hundred times, Saint Morphine, I will bless / You, whom Asclepius would have deified." [Skinner (2011)]
(A number of sources give the name in the last line as "Aeseulapus," but this is almost certainly a mistyping of the Latin form of Asclepius that has been copied without consideration.)
Are there no ideals more stirring than those of martial glory? Is this generation conscious of calls to the service of native land in ways no more worthy than the way of taking a musket and killing somebody? You ask, in the language of Prof. James, for a moral equivalent for war. A patriot needs only look about to find numberless causes that ought to warm the blood and stir the imagination. The dispelling of ignorance and the fostering of education, the investigation of disease and the searching out of remedies that will vanquish the giant ills that decimate the race, the inculcation of good feeling in the industrial world, the cause of the aged, the cause of the men and women who had so little chance — tell me, has war anything that beckons as these things beckon with alluring and compelling power? Whoso wants to share the heroism of battle let him join the fight against ignorance and disease — and the mad idea that war is necessary.
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) American industrialist and philanthropist
“A Plea for Peace,” New York Times (7 Apr 1907)
(Source)
See, I know you entertain some kind of eternal life fantasy because you’ve chosen not to smoke; let me be the first to pop that fucking bubble and send you hurtling back to reality — because you’re dead too. And you know what doctors say: “Shit, if only you’d smoked, we’d have the technology to help you. It’s you people dying from nothing who are screwed.” I got lots of stuff waiting for me: oxygen tent, iron lung, electronic voice box; it’s like going to Sharper Image when I die.
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines — so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable.
Paul Broca (1824-1880) French pathologist, neurosurgeon, anthropologist
“Quelques propositions sur les tumeurs dites cancéreuses” (16 Apr 1849)