Syphilis Disease Quotes & Sayings

It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis... — H.G.Wells

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent. — Norman Mailer

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis. — Karl Kraus

She lived in her head and that's why it glowed. — Miriam Toews

In Georgian England, sweeps and climbing-boys were regarded as general cesspools of disease - dirty, consumptive, syphilitic, pox-ridden - and a "ragged, ill-looking sore," easily attributed to some sexually transmitted illness, was usually treated with a toxic mercury-based chemical and otherwise shrugged off. ("Syphilis," as the saying ran, "was one night with Venus, followed by a thousand nights with mercury.") — Siddhartha Mukherjee

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

"According to Thomas Mann," Peter said, "'Great artists are great invalids. — Chuck Palahniuk

God says, 'One woman, one man,' and everyone says, 'Oh, that's old hat, that's that old Bible stuff,'" he said. "But I'm thinking, well let's see now. A clean guy - a disease-free guy and a disease-free woman - they marry and they keep their sex between the two of them. They're not going to get chlamydia, and gonorrhea, and syphilis, and AIDS. It's safe. — Phil Robertson

Sometimes ... it seems as though not a moment has moved, but then you look up and you're already old or you already have a household of kids or you look down and see your feet are miles and miles away from the rest of you - and you realize you've grown up. — Jacqueline Woodson

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. — Susan Sontag

In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles's soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis. — Carl Zimmer

The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, the skillful direct it. — Madame Roland

A not uncommon practice was to associate nationality with a particular disease, often sexually transmitted. For example, the English called syphilis "The French Disease"; the French called it "The Italian Disease"; the Italians called it "The Turkish Disease"; the Russians called it "The Polish Disease"; and both the Japanese and the Indians termed it "The Portuguese Disease." Only the Spanish accepted any blame, referring to it as "The Spanish Disease. — Daniel N. Leeson

Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s. — Peter Lewis Allen

...And where's Margaret Pier? I know she's not dead, even if she's almost as old as I am and twice as stubborn."

"She said she'd never set foot inside this house again. Not after what you said the last time."

"Did I say something dreadful?"

"You said blind Republicanism like hers was an inherited social disease, like syphilis. You said it. I heard you myself. — Helen Hudson

Sometimes, Shan's father had told him, people can live eighty and ninety years and only briefly, once or twice at most, glimpse the true things of life, the things that are the essence of the planet and of mankind. Sometimes people died without ever seeing a true thing. But, he had assured Shan, you can always find true things if you just know where to look. — Eliot Pattison

You have the establishment and then you have the hippies revolting against the establishment, and what you end up getting are like accountants with long hair. And that's kind of what happened with the youth movement in the '70s. — Mark Russell

and thought to tart it up with a few Shakespeare quotations, having a vague recollection from my undergraduate days that the Bard was fond of joking about the great pox. I dusted off my battered copy of the Riverside Shakespeare and started leafing through it. Holy crap, I thought, there is a lot of stuff here on syphilis. My curiosity was piqued, and I did some more digging. Was there a connection between Shakespeare's syphilitic obsession, contemporary gossip about his sexual misadventures, and the only medical fact known about him with certainty - that his handwriting became tremulous in late middle age? I wrote an article that appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases, supposing it to be of scant interest beyond its immediate specialty audience. To my surprise, it generated a fair amount of Internet buzz, and inspired a segment on The Daily Show. I began to think that there might be interest in a book on the topic of writers and disease, written from a medical perspective. — John J. Ross

In times of crisis, it is of utmost importance to keep one's head. — Marie Antoinette

Imagine you are a pregnant young woman with tuberculosis. The father of your unborn child is a short-tempered alcoholic with syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. You have already had five kids. One is blind, another died young, and a third is deaf and unable to speak. The fourth has tuberculosis - the same disease you have. What would you do in this situation? Should you consider abortion? If you chose to have the abortion, you would have ended a valuable human being - regardless of the possible difficulties it may have brought you. Fortunately, the young woman who was really in this dilemma chose life. Otherwise we would never have heard the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, for this young woman was his mother. — Sean McDowell

You have to find actors who have the ability to display a wide range of emotion effectively. That's so much harder than it seems. — Nicholas Sparks

Life is not all high emotion. Some of the most interesting things are when its not highly emotional: little details of relationships and body language. — David Attenborough

I had asked her for help, and she had sent me to the lions. I knew that she was trying to save her little girl, but sometimes mothers with the best intentions kill their daughters all the same. — Laura Whitcomb

The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love. — Freya Stark

Dying's a fearful popular activity these days so we often double 'em up. — John Marsden

You simply don't realize how much pain the human spirit can endure — Mariah Stewart

I like a bit of color myself, I must say. At my time of life, if you wear nothing but black, people might think you were too mean to change frocks between funerals. — Winifred Holtby

After a lie truth bursts out, and it is no longer the radiant and serene goddess knew or hoped for - it is a disease, it is a moral syphilis and will ravage until the body in which it can dwell has been purged. — James Stephens

Heart disease syphilis pregnancy
All you creeps on the street get away from me — Kathy Acker

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read. — Jack Prelutsky

Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc. — Henry Miller