Chuck Klosterman Quotes

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

I didn't have chemo.

My dad has had a rare form of leukemia since I was in about 7th grade. But they've come up with some amazing drugs since then and he's doing really well today.

We cannot sacrifice innocent human life now for vague and exaggerated promises of medical treatments thirty of forty years from now. There are ways to pursue this technology and respect life at the same time.

Many years ago doctors would bleed sick patients with leeches. Today, the insurance companies do that.

The community at large is under definite obligations to see to it that physicians and scientific men are not needlessly hampered in carrying on the inquiries necessary for an adequate performance of their important social office of sustaining human life and vigor.

Ann Sjoerdsma has successfully blended the fascinating story of her illustrious father's scientific achievements [in wide-ranging] drug research, with an enjoyable historic account of the astounding progress of biomedical science during the second half of the 20th century.

We can and should complain about certain horrors of the modern world, but when it comes to the treatment of mental illness, the advances made in the last hundred years have been far more significant than the space program, nuclear fission, or even The Wire, for so many fortunate people.

Five hundred thousand Americans die from tobacco poisoning every year, and it's legal. I don't know, it just that's the - you can't stop giving people organs because of bad behavior. If you keep on having bad behavior, then of course they'll deny you a liver, or whatever you need.

When years from now people look back on today, they will think the same thing they already do but with more reasons for it.

If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.

People call me an optimist, but I'm really an appreciator ... years ago, I was cured of a badly infected finger with antibiotics when once my doctor could have recommended only a hot water soak or, eventually, surgery.... When I was six years old and had scarlet fever, the first of the miracle drugs, sulfanilamide, saved my life. I'm grateful for computers and photocopiers ... I appreciate where we've come from.

It seems that there's a constant humbling - I don't know if that's the right word - because things are disproved all the time with new discoveries, at least that's the way it feels sometimes in the layman's world. Like, people will make proclamations of something to be true, and then 50 years later that's proven wrong because there's something else.

I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we're such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.

Medicine has made all its progress during the past fifty years. ... How many operations that are now in use were known fifty years ago?-they were not operations, they were executions.

WhenIWasYourAge: People were never "living with their disease." We cured them. Or they died from it.

It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.

Senator John McCain, who spent over five years in a Vietnamese POW camp, publicly releases 1,000 pages of medical records. Now people are left with only open nagging questions: what kind of freak has 1,000 pages of medical records?

How can we be so confident that we are correct about the religion of Islam that it is really different in this insidious way and people 50 years from now, people aren't going to back on.

Most people die from the remedy rather than from the illness.

A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.

Everyone feels like an underdog, at some point in their life. Even the best-looking people and the most athletic probably have a phase in their life - a year or two - where they're awkward or they have braces.

Thousands of people die every year of cold, so if we had global warming it would save lives ... We ought to look out for people. The earth can take care of itself.

I was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, Bahrain. The first year I went pretty much by myself. Then I went with General [Richard] Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The shows and audiences were amazing. You'll never get a better group of people.

I'm sure in a few years it will be unthinkable to say there were 20 years when we didn't recognize the People's Republic of China. And then we'll have to explain what the political constraints were and why it didn't happen earlier.