Bill Bryson Quotes

The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve.

The cost of research, development and testing of a new drug is vastly greater than the cost of each dose produced. How should we pay for new medicines? Innovators should be rewarded according to the impact of their medicine, and people should contribute to these rewards according to their ability to pay.

It's easy to complain that pharmaceutical companies place profits over people and apparently care more about hair loss than TB. However, many in the pharmaceutical industry would be glad for the opportunity to reorient their research toward medicines that are truly needed, provided only that such research is financially sustainable.

Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales.

It is very clear that the present system of innovation for medicines is very inefficient and really somewhat corrupt. It benefits shareholders over patients; it produces for the rich markets and not for the poor and does not produce for minority diseases.

If you look at three diseases, the three major killers, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, the only disease for which we have really good drugs is HIV. And it's very simple: because there's a market in the United States and Europe.

We don't argue if drug companies create drugs that can cure humans and charge lots of money for them, even though we all have these diseases. It will be pretty hard to make a different argument for genes.

There are so few drugs for these killer diseases, but for erectile dysfunction, we have had 14 drugs since 1996… It says something about where the priorities of the pharmaceutical companies seem to lie.

Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years.

Why is there no cure for cancer? Because the medical industry doesn't want one! And the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want one! Because they would lose too much money!

We have a system that's really founded on profit and on selling pharmaceuticals as opposed to keeping people healthy and then helping them get back to health.

I've heard drug experts say they believe if penicillin were discovered today, the FDA wouldn't license it.

For the present system to work, poor people must be excluded from the innovation, because if they could get access at an affordable price, then affluent people would find ways to buy it cheaply as well - and then the innovator would be poorly rewarded and introductions of new medicines would decline.

So here's the situation confronting the drug firms: The drugs cost more to make, but they can't charge more for them. What do they do? Increasingly, the U.S. market is driving them toward drugs aimed at the diseases of richer, older Americans and away from antimicrobials, vaccines, and the like.

We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That's what people forget.... They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.

I have no friends and I never leave my house. You just have to make a choice to just refuse to be involved with things that could get you in trouble. It's easy when you feel upset or depressed about something to want to go to a club and want to drink, but instead I just force myself to sit and feel it and deal with it, and try to grow from it, because I don't want to go down that path. I'm one of the most isolated people in existence right now, but it's worth it because if I wasn't making that decision I would be throwing away my career.

People have been voting to choose their leader but their votes were never allowed to COUNT, I will not allow the choice of the people to be subverted by any party, not even APC

When you take on the position of president, you are committing yourself to, first and foremost, protecting the American people. You are accepting an institutional role that requires you to make hard decisions and hard choices, and as a consequence you have to take your moral sense and not put it aside.

[The] type of education now prevailing all over the world is directed against human freedom. State-controlled education ... deprives people of their free choice, creativity and brilliance.

I'm sure there are people in Hollywood, whose main drive in film is to make money, who will feel that any use of the word hijacking or any reference to anything violent or remotely associated with the terrible tragedy that occurred will lose customers for them. And that will be the only criterion that will matter and so they'll force the minions that work for them to remove these things from their movies, or not make movies about that subject.

What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you.

People ask me about what sacrifices I've made. I always answer: I've made no sacrifices, I've made choices.

I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?... Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

We in America count on the profit motive to get people to do the right thing. That's our basic American notion when it comes to business.

I love when people are resilient and when they form ways of dealing with grief or dealing with some traumatic episode, and sometimes those are the wrong choices.