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“In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.”
― quote from The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“In 1980 the Latin American nations collectively were receiving from their external creditors—major banks, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank—about $11 billion more than they were losing in capital transfers back to wealthy-nation interests. But by 1985 these nations would be losing $35 billion more a year in capital transfers to North America and Europe than they received in loans and investments.41”
― quote from The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“Only mosquito can save Nigeria. Only mosquito can save South Africa. Only mosquito can save Zimbabwe Only mosquito can save Namibia. Only mosquito can save Africa. Only malaria can save Africa. Only yellow fever can save Africa.”
― quote from The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“According to official Soviet statistics submitted to the World Health Organization in the 1970s, virtually every imaginable infectious disease was on the decline or had disappeared, thanks to communist policies. It was widely believed in international health circles at the time that these statistics were wholly fabricated. 9”
― quote from The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“Consider the difference in size between some of the very tiniest and the very largest creatures on Earth. A small bacterium weights as little as 0.00000000001 gram. A blue whale weighs about 100,000,000 grams. Yet a bacterium can kill a whale … . Such is the adaptability and versatility of microorganisms as compared with humans and other so-called “higher” organisms, that they will doubtless continue to colonise and alter the face of the Earth long after we and the rest of our cohabitants have left the stage forever. Microbes, not macrobes, rule the world. —Bernard Dixon, 1994”
― quote from The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“The city of Strasbourg alone savagely slew 16,000 of its Jewish residents, blaming them for spreading the Black Death.10”
― quote from The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“A new global iatrogenic form of malaria was emerging—“iatrogenic” meaning created as a result of medical treatment. In its well-meaning zeal to treat the world’s malaria scourge, humanity had created a new epidemic.”
― quote from The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“Besides, there wasn’t much the lab could tell a physician in 1940 that a well-trained, observant doctor couldn’t determine independently.”
― quote from The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
“There's nothing worse than a label to cement people's loyalties.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Schild's Ladder
“Her betrothed is a lout, her father is a boor; and now her brother is trailing around looking like a thunderstorm about to burst. Men are not sensible creatures.'
'Thank you,' said Robin.”
― Robin McKinley, quote from The Outlaws of Sherwood
“We weren't born yesterday. We are from [New York]. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from the Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still.”
― Frederick Buechner, quote from Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale
“Fancy feathers make peacocks, but you pluck them and see what's left.”
― Catherine Cookson, quote from The Black Candle
“The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.”
― James Frey, quote from Bright Shiny Morning
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