Hans Zinsser Quotes

• Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world. The dragons are all dead and the lance grows rusty in the chimney corner. ... About the only sporting proposition that remains unimpaired by the relentless domestication of a once free-living human species is the war against those ferocious little fellow creatures, which lurk in dark corners and stalk us in the bodies of rats, mice and all kinds of domestic animals; which fly and crawl with the insects, and waylay us in our food and drink and even in our love

  Hans Zinsser

  War, Adventure, Science

  52 Copy quote

• But however secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, Protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will always lurk in the shadows ready to pounce when neglect, poverty, famine, or war lets down the defenses.

  Hans Zinsser

  War, Civilization, Shadow

  52 Copy quote

• Infectious Disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.

  Hans Zinsser

  Adventure, World, Disease

  Hans Zinsser (2011). “Rats, Lice and History”, p.13, Transaction Publishers

  52 Copy quote

• [I]nfectious disease is merely a disagreeable instance of a widely prevalent tendency of all living creatures to save themselves the bother of building, by their own efforts, the things they require. Whenever they find it possible to take advantage of the constructive labors of others, this is the path of least resistance. The plant does the work with its roots and its green leaves. The cow eats the plant. Man eats both of them; and bacteria (or investment bankers) eat the man.

  Hans Zinsser

  Men, Roots, Effort

  10 Copy quote

• Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earthquake, and plague - led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions.

  Hans Zinsser

  Christian, Civilization, Earthquakes

  Hans Zinsser (2011). “Rats, Lice and History”, p.139, Transaction Publishers

  8 Copy quote

• Our task as we grow older in a rapidly advancing science, is to retain the capacity of joy in discoveries which correct older ideas, and to learn from our pupils as we teach them.

  Hans Zinsser

  Learning, Discovery, Ideas

  Hans Zinsser (1940). “As I Remember Him”

  7 Copy quote

• We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically - as Amy Lowell loved Keats - and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span - in their protoplasmic continuities - the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men.

  Hans Zinsser

  Writing, Fate, Men

  Hans Zinsser (2011). “Rats, Lice and History”, p.6, Transaction Publishers

  52 Copy quote

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