Stendhal Quotes

Of course when you look back from all the pandemics that have happened in the world, they were really scary.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that.

The worst potential bio-terrorist is nature itself.

Pandemics happen. When they do, they change the world.

Global pandemics---whether naturally occurring or intentionally spread---pose a greater threat than most man-made weapons of mass destruction.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

More people in the world have died in such a short time of plague than has been heard or seen since the beginning of time …. Whoever touched the sick and dead was immediately infected and died …. That pestilence deprived of human inhabitants villages and cities so that there was scarcely found a man to dwell therein.

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease began to make its way around the Old. The "pox," as it was often called, erupted with dramatic severity.

But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

We have been obliged to respond to the compulsions of our society.

One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

Unfortunately, infectious diseases don’t pay much attention to budget cycles.

Influenza killed more people in September, October, and November of 1918 than AIDS killed in all the years since it entered the human population.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

In the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day ... a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose.