Pestilence Quotes - Page 3

• The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization, as hitherto understood; but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can be most easily borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine.

  James Russell Lowell

  War, Civilization, Doubt

  James Russell Lowell (1910). “Essays, English and American”

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• The ravages of drink are greater than those of war pestilence and famine combined.

  William E. Gladstone

  War, Drink, Famine

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• A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, Culture, Machines

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.8, Counterpoint Press

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• The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.

  William Hazlitt

  Hate, Heart, Land

  "The Pope is a Model Politician" by Joe Keohane, www.esquire.com. October 22, 2013.

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• Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Hero, Ambition, Admiration

  Walter Savage Landor (2016). “Delphi Collected Poetical Works of Walter Savage Landor (Illustrated)”, Delphi Classics

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• It is obvious that the fascist mass pestilence, with its background of thousands of years, cannot be mastered with social measures corresponding to the past three hundred years. The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Sex, Past, Discovery

  "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich, (Preface to the Third Edition), August 1942.

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• Wave to the nice tourists, Sparkle. I promise it won't cause pestilence and firestorms." Elena bit the inside of her cheek at Aodhan's glare-she'd never seen anyone crack his reserved shell. "Sparkle and Bluebell, nice." "Never," Aodhan said, hands stubbornly on the girder, "ever repeat that. Illium seems to have forgotten I promised to separate his tongue from his mouth should he utter it again in this immortal lifetime.

  Nalini Singh

  Nice, Hands, Promise

  Nalini Singh (2013). “Archangel's Legion”, p.116, Penguin

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• When engaged in safe occupations, and living in healthy countries, men are much more apt to be frugal, than in unhealthy, or hazardous occupations, and in climates pernicious to human life. Sailors and soldiers are prodigals. . . . War and pestilence have always waste and luxury, among the other evils that follow in their train.

  John Rae

  Country, War, Men

  John Rae (1834). “Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy: Exposing the Fallacies of the System of Free Trade, and of Some Other Doctrines Maintained in the "Wealth of Nations."”, p.123

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• Love's Pestilence, and her slow dogs of war.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Dog, War

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems”, Cambridge University Press

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• As a brave man goes into fire or flood or pestilence to save a human life, so a generous mind follows after truth and love, and is not frightened from the pursuit by danger or toil or obloquy.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Men, Fire, Brave

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence; Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy.

  George Eliot

  Running, Air, Breathing

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.490, Wordsworth Editions

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• Here is a fearful enemy of God and man — the liquor traffic; it makes ruthless war upon the people; it blasts and destroys their homes as with pestilence and fire; it kills savagely, cruelly, more than a hundred thousand of them every year; robbing them first and driving wives and children to rain and despair.

  Neal S. Dow

  Children, War, Rain

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• The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert... a man with a machine and inadequate culture... is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, Damage, Culture

  "What Are People For?". Book by Wendell Berry, 1990.

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• Sure must be a great consolation to the poor people who lost their stock in the late crash to know that it has fallen in the hands of Mr. Rockefeller, who will take care of it and see that it has a good home and never be allowed to wander around unprotected again. There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war or famine, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.

  Will Rogers

  Business, War, Home

  Will Rogers (1978). “Will Rogers' Daily Telegrams: The Coolidge years, 1926-1929”, Will Rogers Heritage Trust

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• The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.

  H. L. Mencken

  Grief, Banking, Bills

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• Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.

  Jane Austen

  Kings, Real, War

  'Northanger Abbey' (1818) ch. 14 (Catherine Morland)

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• Just as plagues were visited on Pharaoh so will pestilences and disasters be visited on the white man. Why, it has already started: God has begun to send them heat when they expect cold; he sends them cold when they expect heat. Their crops are dying, their children are being born with all kinds of deformities, the rivers and lakes are coming out of the belly of the earth to wash them away.

  Malcolm X

  Children, Men, White Man

  Source: teachingamericanhistory.org

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• Come to the bridal-chamber, Death!
  Come to the mother's, when she feels,
  For the first time, her first-born's breath!
  Come when the blessed seals
  That close the pestilence are broke,
  And crowded cities wail its stroke!

  Fitz-Greene Halleck

  Death, Mother, Blessed

  Fitz-Greene Halleck (1827). “Alnwick Castle, with Other Poems”, p.12

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• The human condition for the vast majority of people on this planet for the entire time of what humanity has been here has been bondage and tyranny, dictatorship, pestilence. That's really what American exceptionalism is, when you get right down to it.

  Rush Limbaugh

  People, Humanity, Majority

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less that God wishes - that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens - that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their course. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebush is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence - the fall of...leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Stars, Moving, Fall

  Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1857). “Sermons of the Rev. C.H. Spurgeon: Second series”, p.201

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• To some it may seem old-fashioned to speak of virtue and chastity, honesty, morality, faith, character, but these are the qualities which have built great men and women and point the way by which one may find happiness in the living of today and eternal joy in the world to come. These are the qualities which are the anchors to our lives, in spite of the trials, the tragedies, the pestilences, and the cruelties of war which bring in their wake appalling destruction, hunger, and bloodshed

  Harold B. Lee

  Honesty, War, Character

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• A society in which marriage is encouraged and industry prevails soon repairs the accidental losses of pestilence and war.

  Edward Gibbon

  War, Loss, Industry

  Edward Gibbon, Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, Theodore Roosevelt (2012). “The Modern Library Essential World History 4-Book Bundle: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged); Montcalm and Wolfe; History of the Conquest of Mexico; The Naval War of 1812”, p.1144, Modern Library

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• I can't decide for you whether or not you have got to write, but if anything in the world, war, or pestilence, or famine, or private hunger, or anything, can stop you from writing, then don't write . . . because if anything can even begin to keep you from writing you aren't a writer and you'll be in a hell of a mess until you find out. If you are a writer, you'll still be in a hell of a mess, but you'll have better reasons.

  William Saroyan

  War, Writing, World

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• Climate change: It's here. If we don't react, war, pestilence and famine will follow close behind

  Rajendra K. Pachauri

  War, Climate, Famine

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• Religion is based on the insistence that over and above all is a purpose and a guiding hand that is beneficent and kind, and would not leave a hair unnumbered or let a sparrow fall unnoticed to the ground. Those who cherish such hallucinations forget that the all-loving power is inflicting tuberculosis, cancer, famine, and pestilence on the trusting, simple sons of men.

  Clarence Darrow

  God, Religious, Cancer

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