Deborah Lacks Quotes

I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.

Soon after, Deborah asked Bobbette what pregnant was. Bobbette told her, then grabbed Deborah’s shoulders again and told her to listen good. “I know your mother and father and all the cousins all mingled together in their own way, but don’t you ever do it, Dale. Cousins are not supposed to be havin sex with each other. That’s uncalled for.

For Deborah and her family—and surely many others in the world—that answer was so much more concrete than the explanation offered by science: that the immortality of Henrietta’s cells had something to do with her telomeres and how HPV interacted with her DNA. The idea that God chose Henrietta as an angel who would be reborn as immortal cells made a lot more sense to them than the explanation

man brought nothing into this world and he’ll carry nothing out. Sometime we care about stuff too much. We worry when there’s nothing to worry about.” In a moment of clarity, Deborah nodded, saying, “And we bring our own body down by doing it.

All oppression starts with the experience of Lack. A lack of ideas, creativity, money, investors, health, friends, love, or kindness. Lack creates the emotional effect of Depression.

Soon after Elsie’s death, a new warden took over at Crownsville and began releasing hundreds of patients who’d been institutionalized unnecessarily. The Washington Post article quoted him saying, “The worst thing you can do to a sick person is close the door and forget about him.” When I read that line out loud, Deborah whispered, “We didn’t forget about her. My mother died … nobody told me she was here. I would have got her out.

Earth is a game of theft in which humans steal life force from one person to the next in order to raise their light quotient supply. It is a dysfunctional game based in lack. Humans unconsciously seek more light by creating energetic cords with another person. It is time to create a better way. It is time to activate divine love and complete self acceptance.

But his lack of artfulness is charming.

Other people’s standards, or lack thereof, don’t dictate my behavior.

Struck by the complete lack of logic in any of their claims, I initially dismissed the Holocaust deniers and their theories out of hand. Then two respected historians suggested that I take a closer, more systematic look.

Proverbs 29:18 shows that when a society lacks any revelation from God (divine insight), such a society heads in the direction of anarchy: “Where there is no vision, the people perish; but happy is he who keeps the teaching.

Our conceptual maps tend to lack a way to conceive the immanence of violence and power in the ideals and practices that have become dominant in the Western tradition. Mass death has tended to be conceived as something accidental, something outside the ordinary run of events. I think the difficulty in coming to terms with the peculiarities of the Western will to power has to do with the absence of a central metaphor capable of describing the link between consumption and death. The consumptive mentality has in many respects been normalized, as has the violence that underpins and is the effect of systems of universal judgment. Certainly the aestheticization of difference is coextensive with the romance with violence that has become so characteristic of contemporary Western society.

If my colleague’s reaction is typical, imagine how often women who think they are displaying a positive quality—connection— are misjudged by men who perceive them as revealing a lack of independence, which the men regard as synonymous with incompetence and insecurity.

Anger is a partnership of two forces in which one of the partners is silent. Anger is the present and accountable emotion while Shame is the silent partner, the thought that projects in the background. Shame is the belief in eternal lack of resolve, which creates violence.

Worry is another way violence gets masked as caring. Worry is a lack of faith in the other and cannot exist simultaneously with love. Either we have faith in the other person to do their best, or we don’t. Worry says I don’t trust you to do your life right. Worry comes from a place of arrogance that I know better what should be happening in your life. Worry says I don’t trust your journey, or your answers, or your timing. Worry is fear that hasn’t grown up yet; it is a misuse of our imagination. We both devalue and insult others when we worry about them.

The lack of divine love has created a parasitical environment in which humans feed on other humans for power, much like vampires seeking blood, although this feeding is energetic power. The lack of divine love frequency has resulted in an environment in which humanity is incapable to undergo the natural process of biological ascension without the help of divine intervention. And yet, divine intervention requires the individual to be conscious beyond the belief in news, government, corporate, and mask wearing programming to ask in commitment, benevolence, and dedication for this hyper vigilant assistance.

At Harvard, so the story goes, one of Carter's professors said that Black people had no history. Carter remembered his father's pride, his mother's courage, and Oliver's determination to learn. He remembered reading the newspaper. Carter spoke up. "No people lacked a history," he said. The professor challenged Carter to prove him wrong. For the rest of his life, Carter did just that.

Guilt is an outward expression of self degradation. It is acceptance of one’s culpability, indiscretion, liability, sin, dereliction, and harm without resolving the crime, violation, or wrong. Guilt desires to remain hidden, hence, the paying for confessions to alleviate responsibility. Where shame separates you from social and cultural obedience, guilt brings you closer to the deceiver such as religion. Guilt is dancing with the devil and calling yourself good.

Winnicott’s key word was “mothering,” Lacan’s was “desire.” For Lacan, desire is what simultaneously defines us as human subjects and what prevents us from ever being whole or complete. To desire something, after all, is to lack something. Whereas Winnicott’s tropes tended toward the organic–he spoke of “growth,” “development,” and “maturity”–Lacan’s imagery was more somber. (“The cipher of his mortal destiny” is characteristically Lacanian.) For Win-nicott, only in illness was the self divided, while for Lacan human subjectivity was necessarily divided, because of the existence of the unconscious. No matter how successful we become, no matter how much we are loved, we will always be vulnerable to irrational fears and capable of the most self-defeating acts. As Freud said, we can never be “master of our own house.

Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana’s campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing “good sex.” “Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,” Herbenick said. “Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men.” The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants," wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. In the original and primary sense of lacks or needs, wants tend to structure our vision of government's responsibilities. The quest for security - whether economic, physical, psychological, or military - brings a sense of urgency to politics and is one of the enduring sources of passion in policy controversies. Need is probably the most fundamental political claim. Even toddlers know that need carries more weight than desire or deservingness. They learn early to counter a rejected request by pleading, "I need it." To claim need is to claim that one should be given the resources or help because they are essential. Of course, this raises the question "essential for what?" In conflicts over security, the central issues are what kind of security government should attempt to provide; what kinds of needs it should attempt to meet; and how the burdens of making security a collective responsibility should be distributed. Just as most people are all for equity and efficiency in the abstract, most people believe that society should help individuals and families when they are in dire need. But beneath this consensus is a turbulent and intense conflict over how to distinguish need from mere desire, and how to preserve a work - or - merit based system of economic distribution in the face of distribution according to need. Defining need for purposes of public programs become much an exercise like defining equity and efficiency. People try to portray their needs as being objective, and policymakers seek to portray their program criteria as objective, in order to put programs beyond political dispute. As with equity and efficiency, there are certain recurring strategies of argument that can be used to expand or contract a needs claim. In defense policy, relative need is far more important than absolute. Our sense of national security (and hence our need for weapons) depends entirely on comparison with the countries we perceive as enemies. And here Keynes is probably right: The need for weapons can only be satisfied by feeling superior to "them." Thus, it doesn't matter how many people our warheads can kill or how many cities they can destroy. What matters is what retaliatory capacity we have left after an attack by the other side, or whether our capacity to sustain an offense is greater than their capacity to destroy it. The paradox of nuclear weapons is that the more security we gain in terms of absolute capability (i.e., kill potential), the more insecure we make ourselves with respect to the consequences of nuclear explosions. We gain superiority only by producing weapons we ourselves are terrified to use.

Father in heaven, Please take up the struggle where I have failed in it. Please do not let this journey have been for naught. I need to know the truth before I die, and I need to leave things well with Deborah and with Epiphany. If I've lacked anything in life, it has been in the asking for help when I needed it and in the believing of things I could not prove. I'm asking now, which ultimately means that I do believe. And perhaps that I am at the point of desperation. You accept prayers from both perspectives, I suspect. Thank you for accepting this one. The end... I mean ... Amen.

For those who lack the classical education of New York’s early butchers and bakers, Xanthippe was Socrates’ wife, and has gone down in history as an atrocious nag. Socrates’ equanimity in enduring (ignoring) her is regularly held out as a proof of his nobility of character. Graves begins by pointing out: why is it that for two thousand years, no one seems to have asked what it might have actually been like to be married to Socrates? Imagine you were saddled with a husband who did next to nothing to support a family, spent all his time trying to prove everyone he met was wrong about everything, and felt true love was only possible between men and underage boys? You wouldn’t express some opinions about this? Socrates has been held out ever since as the paragon of a certain unrelenting notions of pure consistency, an unflinching determination to follow arguments to their logical conclusions, which is surely useful in its way--but he was not a very reasonable person, and those who celebrate him have ended up producing a "mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality" that has done the world enormous harm. Graves writes that as a poet, he feels no choice but to identify himself more with those frozen out of the "rational" space of Greek city, starting with women like Xanthippe, for whom reasonableness doesn’t exclude logic (no one is actually *against* logic) but combines it with a sense of humor, practicality, and simple human decency. With that in mind, it only makes sense that so much of the initiative for creating new forms of democratic process--like consensus--has emerged from the tradition of feminism, which means (among other things) the intellectual tradition of those who have, historically, tended not to be vested with the power of command. Consensus is an attempt to create a politics founded on the principle of reasonableness--one that, as feminist philosopher Deborah Heikes has pointed out, requires not only logical consistency, but "a measure of good judgment, self-criticism, a capacity for social interaction, and a willingness to give and consider reasons." Genuine deliberation, in short. As a facilitation trainer would likely put it, it requires the ability to listen well enough to understand perspectives that are fundamentally different from one’s own, and then try to find pragmatic common ground without attempting to convert one’s interlocutors completely to one’s won perspective. It means viewing democracy as common problem solving among those who respect the fact they will always have, like all humans, somewhat incommensurable points of view. (p. 201-203)

If an adult is married to an abusive spouse, divorce is a sensible solution. Yet, there is normal grief in the decision-making to sever the relationship. Longing for the positive times with the former spouse is balanced against knowing the destructiveness of abuse. Similarly, if a partner callously abandons an adult, grief is normal. Even though the partner may have lacked qualities like loyalty, commitment, or sensitivity, the degree of felt pain is not initially measured by the worthiness of the partner. Only after grieving do people start to realize that their partner’s abandonment might be a bit of luck! The legal and emotional ties of children to their birthparents are similar to marriage. Even though their parents may have abandoned, abused, or neglected them, children will not calibrate their love or longing by the worthiness of their lost parents. Methods that are most successful for grieving children do not emphasize parent replacement, especially in the beginning of placement. Parents who acknowledge that their children are still missing and loving their former parents affirm their children. Parents do not shame their children in any way for their devotion. Instead, parents say that it sounds like the children loved that previous parent the best they could. Sometimes questions give parents a sense of the degree of resolution that a child has about their loss. Examples are, “Did you have a chance to say goodbye? Are you still thinking that you will move back? What might happen so that you could go back?” It helps to ease children into bonding when parents say that they will be giving their children all the love they need, and that children can still care for birthparents or former foster parents. Parents can give matter-of-fact information that all children need someone to love them day-to-day, even if children want to be in another home.

It helps kids to know that they are doing some of the emotional work that their peers may be doing later in life. Learning to cope with lack of control over life’s events, grief over losing loved ones, betrayal over misplaced loyalties, and shame over feeling inadequate are struggles for everyone over the life cycle. For a percentage of people, trauma will also be their experience. These children may be lagging in some emotional developmental tasks, but be ahead, ultimately, in learning to deal with life.

For Lacan, desire is what simultaneously defines us as human subjects and what prevents us from ever being whole or complete. To desire something, after all, is to lack something.

Kincaid refrained from saying that few children seemed to appreciate being given advantages their parents lacked—they saw such benefits as their due.

He is kind. He has almost every attribute that he needs to be successful in life. But he lacks some subtle discernment, some ability to judge character that, from time to time, lands him in settings like this one. Perhaps it is the gentle padding of privilege that allows him to assume the best of everyone.

All demands and expectations that we place on ourselves steal from our own enthusiasm. All self-sabotage, lack of belief in ourselves, low self-esteem, judgments, criticisms, and demands for perfection are forms of self-abuse in which we destroy the very essence of our vitality. All the ways we live in the past or future steal from ourselves. And all the ways we put up fences, whether real or imagined, around our physical belongings or around our mental idealisms, we put up barriers that steal from the full expansion of our own lives.

… a lack of influence is of course its own kind of influence.

If you report results selectively, it becomes easy to prejudge hypotheses: yes, the data may accord amazingly well with a hypothesis H, but such a method is practically guaranteed to issue so good a fit even if H is false and not warranted by the evidence. If it is predetermined that a way will be found to either obtain or interpret data as evidence for H, then data are not being taken seriously in appraising H. H is essentially immune to having its flaws uncovered by the data. H might be said to have “passed” the test, but it is a test that lacks stringency or severity. Everyone understands that this is bad evidence, or no test at all. I call this the severity requirement.

Zeidy never says no just for the sake of saying no, like some rabbis. A good rabbi, Zeidy says, is one who can find the heter, the loophole in the law that allows for flexibility. A rabbi who lacks sufficient knowledge of the Talmud will always lean toward the stricter side, because he is unsure of his own ability to find the loopholes.

You got my wife cells?" "Yeah," I said thinking he was asking if I was calling about his wife's cells. "Yeah?" He said, suddenly bright, alert. "You got my wife cells? She know you talking?" "Yeah" I said thinking he was asking if Deborah knew I was calling. "Well, so let my old lady cells talk to you and leave me alone," he snapped. "I had enough 'a you people." Then he hung up .