Petri Dish Quotes & Sayings

Spectacular sporting events are bread & circuses. The Superbowl, for instance, is anything but "super". It is a Petri dish under the lens of mediaocrity, where surveillance of the spectators is just as mind numbing as the incomprehensible homo-erotic beefcake ballet being enacted on the pitch — Dean Cavanagh

The whole place is a petri dish of angst, generated by kids whose parents gave up on them, which is the worst kind of angst there is. There are fights and ridiculous posturing on a daily basis. — Neal Shusterman

Look, did you ask me to come all the way uptown just so you could stare at me like I was something in a petri dish? Next time I'll send you a photo."
"And I'll frame it and put it on my nightstand," said Jace. — Cassandra Clare

Rebound guys are the best."
"They are?"
"They never even think of getting serious, because everyone knows you don't jump into a relationship right after a divorce. They just want to be your welcome wagon when you start having sex again. It's your time to experiment, girl!"
"The world is my petri dish," I said, raising my drink. — Lisa Kleypas

I seek to lead a democratic Pakistan which is free from the yoke of military dictatorship and that will cease to be a haven, the very petri dish of international terrorism. — Benazir Bhutto

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he'd forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming's serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit. — Peter Thiel

it's an attitude that mostly comes from immaturity, low self-esteem, and feelings of social powerlessness, and adolescence is a petri dish for those kinds of breeding conditions. I — Elliott James

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death - his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently - "shrewdly" and "reasonably" - she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection - a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! — Joyce Carol Oates

Genes are the petri dish of the Soul — Carol Ostrouch

Family is the nucleus unit of any society. Although modern science allows us to create life in a petri dish, I believe God designed humans - like all other animals - to be born of a male and a female union in the context of family according to His divine plan for our spiritual development. Family grounds us and grows us. We first learn how to relate to others through our family relationships. We learn to change and adapt according to the needs of our family. For instance, a mother will notice the subtle moves and shiftings of her baby in her womb. As the baby squirms and moves about, the mother will adjust her body to make the baby more comfortable. Sometimes I think back to the days when I carried my own babies. Tending to their tiniest needs, I began to understand that God tends to our smallest needs just as well. — Taffi Dollar

I don't belong to a religion. Religion's the reason the world's falling apart ... " That's what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It's a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion's not about being holy," Shay said. "Just holier-than-thou. — Jodi Picoult

Who says that art and science cannot coincide? Art is seen as subjective, and science is seen as objective. Paintings, drawings, and sculptures can contain geometric patterns. Most anything you can mix in a beaker or a Petri dish could be displayed as art. The point is that there is art in science, and there is science in art. — Jen Selinsky

A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish. — Chris Crutcher

That's what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It's a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion's not about being holy ... Just holier-than-thous. — Jodi Picoult

It seems to me that election season is just a Petri dish for anger and cynicism. — Max Lucado

The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life
different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability
mingle so freely. — Tom Vanderbilt

Remind me again, why are you talking to me? I thought we had an understanding. I said I wasn't a petri dish and you agreed. — Erica M. Chapman

I think Los Angeles is often portrayed as kind of a petri dish, where bad decisions start and then spread to the rest of the world. I don't see it that way. I feel Los Angeles is a place of almost primal struggle and survival. It's not a city that embraces its inhabitants. — Dan Gilroy

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism. — Robert D. Kaplan

When culture is created in boardrooms with a panel of six or seven strategists for the masses to follow, to me that is no different than an aristocracy. It's not created from the people in the middle of the streets, so to speak. It is created from a petri dish for the sake of making money, and it is undermining the longevity of the culture. — Chuck D

It's the wide variation of women in our little shared petri dish that makes our lives never boring. Really all that we have in common is we each fell in love with a dude in uniform. The rest of it is a wild card. . . . Each of us trying to get through the day, the deployment, and the time in between. — Angela Ricketts

Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again. — Stephen M. Irwin

O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from "Real Housewives" who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her. — Anthony Bourdain

Very few societies on Earth developed science as we know it today. On the other hand, the number is not zero - the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Maya did, among others. Once invented, science proved so useful that it spread like mold on a petri dish. — Seth Shostak

A movie set is like a petri dish for neuroses, you know? It's just, like, egos and weird personalities and, more than anything, fear. — Oscar Isaac

Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish, and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain's supposed to. Get all the functions and features you want, without that clunky-junky twentieth-century hardware thing. — William Gibson

While we're on brunch, how about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is also the favorite environment for bacteria to copulate and reproduce in. Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order. Most likely, the stuff on your eggs was made hours ago and held on station. Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the butter used in the hollandaise is melted table butter, heated, clarified, and strained to get out all the breadcrumbs and cigarette butts. Butter is expensive, you know. Hollandaise is a veritable petri-dish of biohazards. — Anthony Bourdain

Don't order the fish," Yancy advised Merry when they sat down. "But it's a seafood joint." "More like a petri dish with menus. When they say 'catch of the day,' they mean infection." Brennan — Carl Hiaasen

Freedom is anxiety's petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, "Even if you don't want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly." Freedom says, "Even not to choose is to choose." Freedom says, "So long as you are aware of your freedom, you are going to experience the discomfort that freedom brings." Freedom says, "You're on your own. Deal with it. — Daniel Smith

Man-made fabrics? What provenance do they have? A squirt of gloop into a petri dish? Strands of plastic spun in sterile laboratories? They are but toxins made safe by men in white coats. — Fennel Hudson

If you have pendulum clocks on the wall and start them all at different times, after a while the pendulums will all swing in synchronicity. The same thing happens with heart cells in a Petri dish: They start beating in rhythm even when they're not touching one another. — Bruce Lipton

I never get sick on airplanes, which is incredible. You're basically in a flying petri dish. — Danny Meyer

The Internet is the Petri dish of humanity. We can't control what grows in it, but we don't have to watch either. — Tiffany Madison

There was a toilet in the far corner, with nothing in it except basic facilities and about a trillion bacteria. It was like a huge three-dimensional petri dish. — Lee Child

I genuinely don't like Los Angeles. L.A. is this little petri dish of lack of morality. — Chris Eigeman

They don't know what it's about, or ... you know, at least they don't know what's going to happen. This isn't even built like a torture chamber. It's all being watched, right? Water and air sensors. It's a Petri dish. They don't know what that s*** that killed Julie does, and this is how they're finding out."
Holden frowned.
"Don't they have laboratories? Places where you could maybe put that crap on some animals or something? Because as experimental design goes, this seems a little messed up. — James S.A. Corey

War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions. — Richard Engel

I may be the only person in the world who has my own embryonic cells growing in a petri dish. — Peter Nygard

If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. — Brene Brown

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality. — Elizabeth Gilbert

An egg would rendezvous with a sperm one not-so-romantic night in a petri-dish, and cellular division would begin under the watchful eye of some goggle-wearing geek. — Emmie White

Ebola, that little bastard of a bug, had popped up earlier in the summer in Sierra Leone in the worst outbreak in history. Was it possible that global warming had changed something important about the ecological balance in Africa and turned it into an optimal, continent-sized petri dish for breeding that virus? — Bobby Adair

Americans worry that Afghanistan has become a petri dish in which the germs of Islamic fanaticism are replicating - soon Afghans will be hijacking American planes and bombing embassies everywhere. And their fears are not necessarily unfounded. The Taliban are unemployed war veterans, ready and even eager to return to the battlefield. — William T. Vollmann

Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign. — B.V. Lawson

If I feel the urge to burst into flames, I'll let you know. " Simon never had much patience with Jace. "Look, did you ask me to come all the way uptown just so you could stare at me like I was something in a petri dish? Next time I'll send you a photo. " "And I'll frame it and put it on my nightstand, " said Jace sarcastically. — Cassandra Clare