Infecting Quotes & Sayings

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect. — Emile M. Cioran

To this day, being able to "take advantage" of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren't supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw's death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn't really depend on people - that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn't indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives. — J.D. Vance

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. — George Eliot

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony
the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus "the Vaccine Virus" - the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy's arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient - today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination - the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. "It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice," Jenner wrote in 1801. — Richard Preston

Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn't. Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it? — George Saunders

Moral habits, induced by public practices, are far quicker in making their way into men's private lives, than the failings and faults of individuals are in infecting the city at large. — Plutarch

MAY 13 Guard Against Pessimism For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. ROMANS 14:17 NLT I HEARD A STORY ABOUT TWO FARMERS. When the rain fell, one farmer said, "Thank You, Lord, for watering our crops." But the other farmer said, "Yeah, but if the rain keeps up, it's going to rot the roots." When the sun came out, the positive farmer said, "Thank You, Lord, that our crops are getting the vitamins and minerals they need. We'll have a wonderful harvest this year." But the negative farmer said, "Yeah, but if it keeps up, it's going to scorch those plants. We're never going to make a living." Don't you know people who are always focused on the negative? Be sure to guard against their negative attitudes infecting your thinking! Stay focused on the positive things in life. — Joel Osteen

And now a word from our sponsors. Or not now, but later. Much later. You won't know when it happens. It'll be just one of many words you'll encounter that day. But it will come leaden with unseen meaning and consequence, and it will slowly spread throughout your life, invisibly infecting every light moment with its heaviness. Our sponsors cannot be escaped. You will see their word. And you will never know. — Joseph Fink

Perhaps not passionate but comfortable. We could have gone on like that forever and then you came, the rambling man, with all these expatriate philosophies that we've outgrown ourselves over the past 20 years. This is really not our problem, Dick. You're leading a ghost town life, infecting everyone who comes near you with a ghost disease. Take it back, Dick. We don't need it. — Chris Kraus

Despite what I said before, it had not been a fear of infecting other people or poor health that had stopped me from going, but vanity.
It was a good lesson. — Gabrielle Zevin

He feels the darkness of the grave pressing around the fire and infecting his vision so that there seems to be no separation between the living and the dead, a child born with a mud wasp's nest for a heart and its eyes already pocketed with dust, ready to be clapped into a box and dropped down a hole. — Benjamin Percy

I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me.
They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction.
With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country. — Jake Wood

There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice. — Eric Hoffer

You help someone's health, and you prevent them from infecting others. — Anthony S. Fauci

The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence. — Byron White

But it's not just me, you know. The whole world's sad," I said. "It's like a virus. It's going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It's a terrible place to bring a child into," I said. "This world. It is terrible. Just terrible." I — Lauren Groff

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts. — Ezra Pound

We sense a dangerous disease infecting our modern culture and eroding hope: an increasingly prevalent view that greatness owes more to circumstance, even luck, than to action and discipline
that what happens to us matters more than what we do. In games of chance like a lottery or roulette, this view seems plausible. But taken as an entire philosophy, applied more broadly to human endeavor, it's a deeply debilitating life perspective, one that we can't imagine wanting to teach young people. Do we really believe that our actions count for little, that those who create something great are merely lucky, that our circumstances imprison us? Do we want to build a society and culture that encourage us to believe that we aren't responsible for our choices and accountable for our performance? — James C. Collins

But the Grateful Dead, as the fanatic fans point out, are a way of life: someone else's. Twentieth-century teenagers, especially American ones, have been brilliant at creating their own culture, their own music, clothes, and point(s) of view. It's sad and fraudulent that the kind of wholesale worship of some historical way of life has settled over so many young people, infecting them like a noxious gas ... I love the dead
grew up in the thrall of Shakespeare and Hank Williams and James Dean. And I adore the Rolling Stones. But there's a difference between cherishing "Satisfaction" and wearing Keith Richards' hair while doing Keith Richards' drugs. I don't want to be Keith Richards. I wanna be me. Not
like the neo-Deadheads
just another extra in an overblown costume drama about something that wasn't that interesting the first time around. — Sarah Vowell

Miss Marshall spent her life daring those more powerful than her to swat her down. The hell of it was, her determination was some kind of contagion. He could feel it infecting him, making him believe. Making him tell himself lies like 'I could do some good' and 'I want her forever'. — Courtney Milan

Superior insight into history used to be exhilarating for radicals: if we can see more clearly than the Enemy what is really going on, then we can use this knowledge to advance our values. But now the clearer one's insight, the more numbed one becomes. Thus during the war, some of us wrote articles in this magazine predicting that the conflict would not solve anything,... that the methods used by the Allies were infecting the moral atmosphere, that Russia and America would clash violently as soon as Germany was disposed of, etc., etc.... It turns out we were more right than [the rest]. This should make us feel prescient, confident. Instead, it is discouraging. — Dwight Macdonald

The Russian technique for infecting water supplies was particularly ingenious." Back — Aldous Huxley

The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

March brought the news of Frederick's marriage. He and Dolores wrote; she in Spanish-English, as was but natural, and he with little turns and inversions of words which proved how far the idioms of his bride's country were infecting him. — Elizabeth Gaskell

The hacking practice is quite widespread in its own right: one NSA document indicates that the agency has succeeded in infecting at least fifty thousand individual computers with a type of malware called "Quantum Insertion." One map shows the places where such operations have been performed and the number of successful insertions: — Glenn Greenwald

Critics in particular treat CGI as a virus that's infecting film. — Peter Jackson

Smoke.. makes a kitchen also oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soiling and infecting them, with an unctuous and oily kinde of Soote as hath been found in some great Tobacco takers, that after their death were opened. — King James I

The meal was full of jovial conversation and laughter. Everyone was as happy as if Peter was right there amongst them, for you see, it was true what the King and the doctor had observed- Peter had a way of infecting people with happiness that lingered even in his absence. The effect was stronger for some people than it was for others, but all of the company gathered here had come to love and trust Peter, and therefore his influence on them was very strong- strong enough, perhaps, to last them to the end of their days. — Christopher Daniel Mechling

Reverend Forbes did not talk about Jonathan Carlson at all. He railed against sinners everywhere, the tone of his voice showing clearly that he felt that everything beyond his own church in Friendly became steadily more evil, and that Satan's blood dripped down the sides of the mountain, infecting all of those below with his darkness. — Chet Williamson

He was distracted by a brief surge of adrenaline as he remembered the girl's blood-soaked body. Flesh separated and puckered, he had left her in such a manner that her sacrification would be remembered.

The recollection aroused him. Death and sensuality combined to create a unique vision of purity and abhorrence. Though he had experienced doubts since beginning, he knew the mission he had been tasked with was necessary. It had given him a purity of purpose. These women needed to be punished, all in her name. And yet he felt guilt. Not enough to consume him, but enough to have it niggling away in the back of his mind like a parasite infecting his very soul.
May God forgive me for the deeds I committed on Kelly, no heart no heart. — David McCaffrey

We have Borna virus genes. We're part Borna virus, which is weird, but apparently our cells and our genomes in a weird way might actually be grabbing these viruses, grabbing genetic material from the viruses that are infecting it and pulling them into their own genome. — Carl Zimmer

They think I don't exist . . . they think I'm like a disease. I'm infecting Carly. — Dawn Kurtagich

The Old Fortress at Tirfang, it had a bad name: witches built it, raised it by magic, infecting even the ordinary materials in which they worked - stone, timber, and slate - with their dark sorceries. — Madeline Howard

Studies show that in a phenomenon called "emotional contagion," we unconsciously catch emotions from other people
whether good moods or bad ones. Taking the time to be silly means that we're infecting one another with good cheer, and people who enjoy silliness are one third more likely to be happy. — Gretchen Rubin

Just as the only reservoir for the typhus virus in nature is provided by man, so the only vector of infection is the louse. The bite of the louse is not virulent immediately after the infecting meal. It becomes so only towards the 7th day following infection. — Charles Jules Henry Nicole

If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind. — Jack Vance

I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a writer. It can damage successful writers by giving them an exalted sense of what they've done, and it can crush less successful writers by infecting them with envy and malice at an early stage in their careers. — Pankaj Mishra

I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds. — Lauren Slater

Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street. — Woodrow Wilson

Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance. — George Eliot

The happiness of society depends so much on preventing party spirit from infecting the common intercourse of life, that nothing should be spared to harmonize and amalgamate the two parties in social circles. — Thomas Jefferson

War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We can bring peace in the world, not by eliminating violence in the world, but by finding the causes of violence and by preventing those from infecting the society. — Debasish Mridha

The history of prevailing status quos shows decay and decadence infecting the opulent materialism of the Haves. The spiritual life of the Haves is a ritualistic justification of their possessions. — Saul D. Alinsky

She's not just under my skin, she's in my organs, wrapped up in my cells, infecting me. — J.M. Darhower

I did a school play when I was 10 where I played a cold germ infecting a whole classroom of kids. The play was called 'Piffle It's Only a Sniffle.' I'd never had so much fun. It was a thrill. — Kim Cattrall

I'm taking this time to create my day and I'm infecting the quantum field. Now if (it) is in fact the observer's watching me the whole time that I'm doing this and there is a spiritual aspect to myself, then show me a sign today that you paid attention to any one of these things that I created, and bring them in a way that I won't expect, so I'm as surprised at my ability to be able to experience these things. And make it so that I have no doubt that it's come from you,' and so I live my life, in a sense, all day long thinking about being a genius or thinking about being the glory and the power of God or thinking about being unconditional love. — Joe Dispenza

There is a strain of loneliness infecting many Christians, which only the presence of God can cure. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

Fear is hugely contagious. Used skillfully by politicians looking to manipulate voters, it can become toxic and capable of infecting more than just a few. — Mike Barnicle

In a crowd we are "microbes" infecting everyone around us, a "grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will." We are impulsive, irritable, irrational: — Jon Ronson

That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture. — Tariq Ali

The real threat to society is darkness.
Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same void, inhabit the same flesh, are dissolved in the same ashes. But ignorance infecting the human substance turns it black, and that incurable blackness, gaining possession of the soul, becomes Evil. — Victor Hugo

Negative thoughts are planted like a seed in the brain, and then once they grow, they take over the whole mind. Infecting your ability to see truth and beauty clearly. To see the honesty behind a person or situation. In the end those thoughts take over, and you lose sight of the joy of having that person in your life. Like the weed. It will grow and infest the entire planter box until all the beauty is destroyed and all that remains is the one thing you didn't want in the first place. The weed or in this case, the negative thought. — Audrey Carlan