Quotes & Sayings About Bloodletting

The art of phlebotomy originated with bloodletting in 1400 B.C., and the modern clinical lab emerged in the 1960s - and it has not fundamentally evolved since then. You go in, sit down, they put a tourniquet on your arm, stick you with a needle, take these tubes and tubes of blood. — Elizabeth Holmes

Vamps are really only like ten percent fun at any given time. The other ninety percent is largely fretting. And bloodletting. — Chloe Neill

Converting the war into an antislavery crusade was a brilliant move on Lincoln's part, and it resulted in a surge of voluntary recruits into the Union army. But this did not last. Northerners may have disapproved of slavery in the South but, once the bloodletting began in earnest, their willingness to die for that conviction began to wane. [ ... ] Lincoln faced the embarrassing reality that he soon would have no army to carry on the crusade. — G. Edward Griffin

And then, suddenly, we broke free from the trees. The rolling plain beyond was almost overwhelming in its openness, especially lit by a brilliant, almost awful sunset, the sky never redder, every cloud seemingly blazing from within, suffused with fire and vengeance, roiling, churning, nothing but fury in every direction. Some poets spoke of red sunsets as things of sublime beauty, prefacing good fortune or romance, but they always seemed to be foretelling some bloodletting, murder, or tragedy writ large for all the world to see, and never more so than now. — Jeff Salyards

Scary as this was ... telling her these things was like a bloodletting. The initial cut hurt like hell, but with it done he could feel the toxins escaping, making room for relief. And all at once he wanted to give in. With a blinding bolt of understanding, he realized he'd had it all wrong, blaming his fetish all this time, thinking of it as some twisted, fucked-up force that lived inside him. A thing to be drowned in liquor, glass by glass, night by night, year after year. It wasn't his desire that had poisoned him. It was his shame. — Cara McKenna

Nothing but sunrise and sunsetting
Men fighting the things that are-
Birthgiving and bloodletting
And a drunk god snoring afar. — Dan Levin

We can bear up under everything, if we have only the certainty that the monster Hitler with his insatiable bloodletting and plundering will have committed soon his last shameful deed. — Friedrich Kellner

ominous murmur ran through the legion of onlookers, who had heretofore maintained an uncharacteristic silence. Their resentment was palpable. Five days later Coligny was assassinated, and the streets of Paris ran with blood as the entire Huguenot wedding party was hunted down and slaughtered in one of the most infamous episodes in French history, known today as the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. But this horrific mass murder, which claimed more than five thousand martyrs over the course of a week, was no spontaneous bloodletting. Rather, it was the denouement of a carefully constructed plot that utilized the unsuspecting Margot as both victim and bait to lure Coligny and his faction to their doom, an intrigue planned, instigated, and executed by the one individual in France powerful enough — Nancy Goldstone

People make the mistake of assuming far too many things about armies,' Lefevre told me one evening. 'They assume, for a start, that generals know what they are doing and know what is going on. They assume that orders pass down from top to bottom in a smooth and regulated fashion. And above all they assume that wars start only when people decide to start them.' 'You are going to tell me that is not the case?' 'Wars begin when they are ready, when humanity needs a bloodletting. Kings and politicians and generals have little say in it. You can feel it in the air when one is brewing. There is a tension and nervousness on the face of the least soldier. They can smell it coming in a way politicians cannot. The desire to hurt and destroy spreads over a region and over the troops. And then the generals can only hope to have the vaguest notion of what they are doing. — Iain Pears

There are numerous historical reports as well as visual images that link mushroom consumption to the ritual of sacrifice. These include bloodletting, penis perforation, and even the improbable act of self-decapitation. — John Rush

Bloodletting on my premises that I ain't approved I take as a f***ing affront. It puts me off my feed. — Al Swearengen

I figured Katie was likely swimming in blood. Ick. I looked at the moon and judged that the bloodletting took over two hours before Sabina called a halt by saying words I didn't understand, in French, or Latin, or Mandarin for all I knew. — Faith Hunter

In March 1853 she was afflicted with a pain in the chest; her tongue seemed to be covered with a film; leeches failed to make her breathing any easier. — Gustave Flaubert

Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer. — Sam Harris

War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than she - yet according to ethics of nations it does. I have conquered her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is left in it belongs to my heirs and successors, forever. That is war! — Nellie L. McClung

About one or two songs per record is me doing a little bloodletting. — Art Alexakis

When future historians look back on our way of curing inflation ... they'll probably compare it to bloodletting in the Middle Ages. — Lee Iacocca

A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile. — Philip Ball

Is not this home, this biosphere where cunning and violence is rewarded, resources are frighteningly scarce and security never guaranteed, a nightmarish cage where every inmate is contracted by birth to prey upon the other in order to steal the proteins and fats and sugars and minerals they need just to stay alive one more day in what amounts to a daily apocalypse of obliged bloodletting? — John Zande

Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine. — Napoleon Bonaparte

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. — Jane Jacobs

I think 'Pretty Polly' is an attempt to speak to these same nature spirits. It is a ritual of bloodletting, an appeal to invisible forces, a cry to the goddess to come embrace us with her thorny arms. Polly's murder works as Joseph Campbell believed all myth worked - as a secret opening, a knife slashed in the veil of experience through which deep knowledge may seep. To those not gifted enough to hear the bean plants talk or to see the fairies dancing, myth may be our only access to places outside our conscious perception of reality. — Rennie Sparks

It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting. — Mary Renault

We can only reach our goal amid bloodletting — Nazim Hikmet

I don't like and even resist, being broken wide-open. But, when the contents of my unconscious self spill out of me and i sift through all the disowned parts of who i am ... it's an uncomfortably enlightening and eye-opening experience. It feels a bit like emotional bloodletting. I guess every now and then, i need that release valve to open all the way ... — Jaeda DeWalt

Let the juices that are stirred into new life flow at this creative bloodletting of our artistic beings. (Zoltan Galos) — Z.J. Galos

MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it's a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it's a show. They don't understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don't remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting. — Mindy Mejia

Ach bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable. — Bill Clinton

In the Middle Ages, bloodletting was often performed by barbers, which is why the traditional barber's pole - like the bloody towels that once hung outside barber shops - is colored red and white. — Cary McNeal

I had seen that once before, bleeding water. A little baby I worked on as a resident in training. That poor kid had been shot as well - his father had blasted away the top of his head with a shotgun - and we couldn't begin to stop the bloodletting in that case. "Looking pretty thin down here," I hollered when the stuff coming out his wounds was no more than pink salt water. That baby's heart stopped, started, stopped and started a dozen times before it finally gave up the ghost and we pronounced him. I could have read a newspaper through the watery stuff coming out his veins by then. — Edison McDaniels