“
For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
“
Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
“
I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.
”
”
Cornel West (Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life)
“
James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
“
I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.
”
”
William Styron (Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness)
“
Every family has a myth for the young to inherit – an undocumented fable passed between mouths, a grave illness to be contracted – as if the very words were a blight to infect the youth with and let them know they’re now welcome to the fold.
After all, what exactly is a family, if not a brotherhood and sisterhood afflicted with the same terminal disease?
”
”
Eric LaRocca (Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke)
“
Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.… If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way.
”
”
Blake Mycoskie (Start Something That Matters)
“
Too bad. And Mozart, not long after writing The Magic Flute, had died--in his thirties--of kidney disease. And had been buried in an unmarked pauper's grave.
Thinking this, he wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name "Mozart" will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I will get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I'm part of the form-destroying process of entropy.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
“
I am thirsty, and very susceptible to flattery... you could talk me into anything..."
"So much for fighting the good fight," I observed dryly. "He'll have a harem within a week."
Bones watched Juan disappear down the hall, nuzzling the blonde's neck in a manner that didn't speak only of hunger. "He's a fine bloke. He'll learn."
"Learn what?" At least he can't get or pass diseases anymore, I thought. That's one advantage turning Juan into a vampire did for womankind.
Bones put an arm around me as we headed toward the exit of the flesh feast. "He'll learn that many women can satisfy for a short period of time, but when he falls in love, only one will sustain him forever."
I cast him a sideways glance "Are you trying to seduce me?"
His lips curled with promise. "Absolutely.
”
”
Jeaniene Frost (At Grave's End (Night Huntress, #3))
“
Human existence is a penal colony; a sexually transmitted disease; a disappointment; nothing but suffering; “a sky-dive: out of a cunt into the grave”; a one-way ticket to the crematorium. “Nobody gets out of here alive”. Every day is a grim passage, a struggle through moments and hours of loneliness, boredom, emptiness, and self-loathing. I count myself among the pessimists. I believe that life is suffering. I force myself (my contraself) to look at other positions, but this remains my default. More specifically, I am a depressive realist.
”
”
Colin Feltham (Keeping Ourselves in the Dark)
“
Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
“
To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.
”
”
John Garth (Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth)
“
Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their graves in order to take their land & its riches? Wolves don’t sit in their caves, concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep! “Intellectual courage”? True “intellectual courage” is to dispense with these fig leaves & admit all peoples are predatory, but White predators, with our deadly duet of disease dust & firearms, are examplars of predacity par excellence, & what of it?
”
”
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
“
Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave most anytime. Not that I mind too much; I've done everything I ever wanted to do. But ... as you know, one would like to continue doing the good things over and over again, so long as there's pleasure in it.
”
”
Edward Abbey (Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast)
“
James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?” I blink and my mother blinks back, and then she is laughing and so am I. Even as I crumple inside.
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
“
At the end of life, nobody knows where the spirit goes.
”
”
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
“
Gluttony is the act of digging a grave with your own teeth.
”
”
Enock Maregesi
“
Someday” (“someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that”) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.
”
”
Rolf Potts (Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel)
“
Sadly, the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” (“someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that”) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro
”
”
Rolf Potts (Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel)
“
The power of persistence is required especially when we’re dealing with intense, emotionally devastating circumstances or bunches of hugely difficult things that have stacked up all at once. When you’re facing a diagnosis of Graves’ disease, a taxi accident, and the imminent death of your sister, and your boyfriend has just moved to Japan, you will definitely need to call on persistence.
”
”
Daphne Rose Kingma (The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart: An Emotional and Spiritual Handbook)
“
facts matter a great deal. What a patient does for a living, what his background is, what level of education he has achieved…all of these issues must be addressed in great detail in order to put his complaints and his disease in the proper context. If I ask a man to take the square root of 100 and he cannot, I might take this as proof of a left-hemispheric brain tumor, unless I know that he has worked on a farm since childhood and never attended school. Likewise, I might find it normal that a patient could not tell me the current exchange rate of the pound in Japanese yen. But if I knew that person was a merchant banker, on the other hand, ignorance of this fact would indicate a grave illness indeed! Americans have grown so dependent upon their scanning toys that they fail to view the patient as a multidimensional person. To have the audacity to cut into a person’s brain without the slightest clue of his life, his occupation…I find that most simply appalling.” These
”
”
Frank T. Vertosick Jr. (When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery)
“
Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
“
A wife, he knew, was a huge armful of responsibility, and responsibility was the disease in man. But he was lonely, and twice as lonely after leaving the woman by the graves.
”
”
Vardis Fisher (Mountain Man)
“
Love is a grave mental disease.” “Shakespeare?” Kyle shook his head. “Plato.
”
”
Tracy Brogan (Crazy Little Thing (Bell Harbor, #1))
“
If the decline of art is obvious which it is and if art is the soul of the nation, then our nation, our country, is suffering from a grave psychic disease.
”
”
Andrei Tarkovsky
“
For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.
”
”
null
“
These days the legacy newborn babies bring into the world with them isn’t a lack of nutrition, but the opposite. So they are not only being born into households where people eat more and exercise less, but have an innate and enhanced vulnerability to succumb to the diseases that poor lifestyles bring. It has been suggested that children growing up today will be the first in modern history to live shorter, less healthy lives than those of their parents. We aren’t just eating ourselves into early graves, it seems, but breeding children to jump in alongside us.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
If you have not died in the womb, or fallen prey to infant mortality, or to a young girl's greensickness, or to the dangers of childbirth, or if persistent pregnancies and perennial breeding have not worn you to a shadow, and you have not dwindled into a premature grave, then if war, sickness, accident or disease all keep their distance, your chances may be strong for a long life.
”
”
Elspeth Marr (Aunt Epp's Guide for Life: Miscellaneous Musings of a Victorian Lady)
“
We must act now to prevent further spread of EBOLA VIRUS. If we do not act collectively, EBOLA VIRUS will wipe all whole populations and generations into their grave. The call to action is now.
”
”
Lailah Gifty Akita
“
Why do we need to be pardoned? What are we to be pardoned for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should we ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, break-bone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count with no one saying, “Enough!” which would at least have granted some meaning to their deaths, a meaning no one ever sought for them, the dead of all times, who are now dying once again, but now in order to live? Should we ask pardon from those who deny us the right and capacity to govern ourselves? From those who don’t respect our customs and our culture and who ask us for identification papers and obedience to a law whose existence and moral basis we don’t accept? From those who oppress us, torture us, assassinate us, disappear us from the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not too big and not too small, but just a simple piece of land on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it?
”
”
Subcomandante Marcos
“
Is that the Three-and-Twentieth, Strabo mine,
Marching below, and we still gulping wine?”
From the sad magic of his fragrant cup
The red-faced old centurion started up,
Cursed, battered on the table. “No,” he said,
“Not that! The Three-and-Twentieth Legion’s dead,
Dead in the first year of this damned campaign—
The Legion’s dead, dead, and won’t rise again.
Pity? Rome pities her brave lads that die,
But we need pity also, you and I,
Whom Gallic spear and Belgian arrow miss,
Who live to see the Legion come to this,
Unsoldierlike, slovenly, bent on loot,
Grumblers, diseased, unskilled to thrust or shoot.
O, brown cheek, muscled shoulder, sturdy thigh!
Where are they now? God! watch it struggle by,
The sullen pack of ragged ugly swine.
Is that the Legion, Gracchus? Quick, the wine!”
“Strabo,” said Gracchus, “you are strange tonight.
The Legion is the Legion; it’s all right.
If these new men are slovenly, in your thinking,
God damn it! you’ll not better them by drinking.
They all try, Strabo; trust their hearts and hands.
The Legion is the Legion while Rome stands,
And these same men before the autumn’s fall
Shall bang old Vercingetorix out of Gaul.
”
”
Robert Graves
“
Hypocritical, egotistical
Don't wanna be the parenthetical, hypothetical
Working onto something that I'm proud of, out of the box
An epoxy to the world and the vision we've lost
I'm an apostrophe
I'm just a symbol to remind you that there's more to see
I'm just a product of the system, a catastrophe
And yet a masterpiece, and yet I'm half-diseased
And when I am deceased
At least I go down to the grave and die happily
Leave the body and my soul to be a part of thee
I do what it takes
”
”
Imagine Dragons
“
Out of the lions' den for Daniel, the prison for Peter, the whale's belly for Jonah, Goliath's shadow for David the storm for the disciples, disease for the lepers, doubt for Thomas, the grave for Lazarus, and the shackles for Paul. God gets us through stuff.
”
”
Max Lucado (You'll Get Through This Study Guide with DVD Pack: Hope and Help for Your Turbulent Times by Max Lucado (2013-09-10))
“
What have you against analysis?’ Nothing—when it serves the cause of enlightenment, freedom, progress. Everything when it is pervaded by the horrible haut goût of the grave. And thus too with the body. We are to honour and uphold the body when it is a question of emancipation, of beauty, of freedom of thought, of joy, of desire. We must despise it in so far as it sets itself up as the principle of gravity and inertia, when it obstructs the movement toward light; we must despise it in so far as it represents the principle of disease and death, in so far as its specific essence is the essence of perversity, of decay, sensuality, and shame.
”
”
Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)
“
The teeth are made from stern stuff. They can withstand floods, fires, even centuries in the grave. But the teeth are no match for the slow-motion catastrophe that is a life of poverty: its burdens, distractions, diseases, privations, low expectations, transience, the addictive antidotes that offer temporary relief at usurious rates. Others
”
”
Mary Otto (Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America)
“
The look of the world’s a lie, a face made up
O’er graves and fiery depths, and nothing’s true
But what is horrible. If man could see
The perils and diseases that he elbows
Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him,
Which fall behind and graze him as he passes,
Then would he know that life’s a single pilgrim
Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers
”
”
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Death's Jest Book (Fyfield Books))
“
Representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution)
“
For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain -- appreciated "the glad tidings of great joy." For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God."
From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good.
In the Old Testament, they said. God is the judge -- but in the New, Christ is the merciful. As a matter of fact, the New Testament is infinitely worse than the Old. In the Old there is no threat of eternal pain. Jehovah had no eternal prison -- no everlasting fire. His hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his enemy was dead.
In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God is infinite and the hunger of his revenge eternal.
The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words; "Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels."
These are the words of "eternal love."
No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror.
All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul.
This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice of God -- the mercy of Christ.
This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain.
Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed.
It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge.
Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God.
While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.
”
”
Robert G. Ingersoll
“
. . . for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savor the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish; unless, strained, simulated, again overstrained, and, at last, destroyed our faculties for enjoyment; then, truly, we may find ourselves without support, robbed of hope. Our agony is great, and how can it end? We have broken the spring of our powers; life must be all suffering‐‐ too feeble to conceive faith‐‐death must be darkness‐‐God, spirits, religion can have no place in our collapsed minds, where linger only hideous and polluting recollections of vice; and time brings us on to the brink of the grave, and dissolution flings us in‐‐a rag eaten through and through with disease, wrung together with pain, stamped into the churchyard sod by the inexorable heel of despair.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (The Professor)
“
It turns out that since 1825, researchers have known that Graves’ disease is often correlated with stressful life events, which Trinity had in spades. It was clear that her problems with emotional regulation were overlaid on the hyperthyroidism, making her time in the classroom that much more difficult. The crazy thing is that many busy physicians do their entire assessment of ADHD based on behavioral symptoms alone, without a stethoscope
”
”
Nadine Burke Harris (The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity)
“
The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense—and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them—that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
“
According to the gospels, Christ healed diseases, cast out devils, rebuked the sea, cured the blind, fed multitudes with five loaves and two fishes, walked on the sea, cursed a fig tree, turned water into wine and raised the dead.
How is it possible to substantiate these miracles?
The Jews, among whom they were said to have been performed, did not believe them. The diseased, the palsied, the leprous, the blind who were cured, did not become followers of Christ. Those that were raised from the dead were never heard of again.
Can we believe that Christ raised the dead?
A widow living in Nain is following the body of her son to the tomb. Christ halts the funeral procession and raises the young man from the dead and gives him back to the arms of his mother.
This young man disappears. He is never heard of again. No one takes the slightest interest in the man who returned from the realm of death. Luke is the only one who tells the story. Maybe Matthew, Mark and John never heard of it, or did not believe it and so failed to record it.
John says that Lazarus was raised from the dead.
It was more wonderful than the raising of the widow’s son. He had not been laid in the tomb for days. He was only on his way to the grave, but Lazarus was actually dead. He had begun to decay.
Lazarus did not excite the least interest. No one asked him about the other world. No one inquired of him about their dead friends.
When he died the second time no one said: “He is not afraid. He has traveled that road twice and knows just where he is going.”
We do not believe in the miracles of Mohammed, and yet they are as well attested as this. We have no confidence in the miracles performed by Joseph Smith, and yet the evidence is far greater, far better.
If a man should go about now pretending to raise the dead, pretending to cast out devils, we would regard him as insane. What, then, can we say of Christ? If we wish to save his reputation we are compelled to say that he never pretended to raise the dead; that he never claimed to have cast out devils.
We must take the ground that these ignorant and impossible things were invented by zealous disciples, who sought to deify their leader. In those ignorant days these falsehoods added to the fame of Christ. But now they put his character in peril and belittle the authors of the gospels.
Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven.
Why did he not again enter the temple and end the old dispute with demonstration? Why did he not confront the Roman soldiers who had taken money to falsely swear that his body had been stolen by his friends? Why did he not make another triumphal entry into Jerusalem? Why did he not say to the multitude: “Here are the wounds in my feet, and in my hands, and in my side. I am the one you endeavored to kill, but death is my slave”? Simply because the resurrection is a myth. The miracle of the resurrection I do not and cannot believe.
We know nothing certainly of Jesus Christ. We know nothing of his infancy, nothing of his youth, and we are not sure that such a person ever existed.
There was in all probability such a man as Jesus Christ. He may have lived in Jerusalem. He may have been crucified; but that he was the Son of God, or that he was raised from the dead, and ascended bodily to heaven, has never been, and, in the nature of things, can never be, substantiated.
”
”
Robert G. Ingersoll
“
A man once made it a reproach that I should be so happy, and told me everybody has crosses, and that we live in a vale of woe. I mentioned moles as my principal cross, and pointed to the huge black mounds with which they had decorated the tennis–court, but I could not agree to the vale of woe, and could not be shaken in my belief that the world is a dear and lovely place, with everything in it to make us happy so long as we walk humbly and diet ourselves. He pointed out that sorrow and sickness were sure to come, and seemed quite angry with me when I suggested that they too could be borne perhaps with cheerfulness. ‘And have not even such things their sunny side?’ I exclaimed. ‘When I am steeped to the lips in diseases and doctors, I shall at least have something to talk about that interests my women friends, and need not sit as I do now wondering what I shall say next and wishing they would go.’ He replied that all around me lay misery, sin, and suffering, and that every person not absolutely blinded by selfishness must be aware of it and must realise the seriousness and tragedy of existence. I asked him whether my being miserable and discontented would help any one or make him less wretched; and he said that we all had to take up our burdens. I assured him I would not shrink from mine, though I felt secretly ashamed of it when I remembered that it was only moles, and he went away with a grave face and a shaking head, back to his wife and his eleven children. I heard soon afterwards that a twelfth baby had been born and his wife had died, and in dying had turned her face with a quite unaccountable impatience away from him and to the wall; and the rumour of his piety reached even into my garden, and how he had said, as he closed her eyes, ‘It is the Will of God.’ He was a missionary.
”
”
Elizabeth von Arnim (The Solitary Summer (Elizabeth))
“
People feel ashamed of being depressed, they feel they should snap out of it, they feel weak and inadequate. Of course, these feelings are symptoms of the disease. Depression is a grave and life-threatening illness, much more common than we recognize. As far as the depressive being weak or inadequate, let me drop some names of famous depressives: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud. Terry Bradshaw, Drew Carey, Billy Joel, T. Boone Pickens, J. K. Rowling, Brooke Shields, Mike Wallace. Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Mark Twain.
”
”
Richard O'Connor (Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn't Teach You and Medication Can't Give You)
“
depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases. Except in those maladies strictly designated as malignant or degenerative, we expect some kind of treatment and eventual amelioration, by pills or physical therapy or diet or surgery, with a logical progression from the initial relief of symptoms to final cure. Frighteningly, the layman-sufferer from major depression, taking a peek into some of the many books currently on the market, will find much in the way of theory and symptomatology and very little that legitimately suggests the possibility of quick rescue. Those that do claim an easy way out are glib and most likely fraudulent. There are decent popular works which intelligently point the way toward treatment and cure, demonstrating how certain therapies—psychotherapy or pharmacology, or a combination of these—can indeed restore people to health in all but the most persistent and devastating cases; but the wisest books among them underscore the hard truth that serious depressions do not disappear overnight. All of this emphasizes an essential though difficult reality which I think needs stating at the outset of my own chronicle: the disease of depression remains a great mystery. It has yielded its secrets
”
”
William Styron (Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness)
“
Did you know that in 90% of cases, hypothyroidism is an autoimmune disease? Did you know that autoimmune thyroid disease is linked to a gluten intolerance? Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease are most likely caused by a gluten intolerance. What happens is that the molecular structure of gliadin (the protein in gluten) resembles the thyroid gland. If you don’t have a healthy intestinal lining, you can create holes; enter leaky gut syndrome. To review, leaky gut happens because food leaks into the bloodstream, and since your blood doesn’t know what the substances are, it puts your immune system into overdrive to kill the foreign substance (this is why I have my clients get a thyroid “antibody” test; it helps determine if there is a food allergy).
”
”
Maria Emmerich (Keto-Adapted)
“
Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, warned about the dangers of stress for a full decade before she realized that maybe it was her advice, rather than stress itself, that was sending people to their graves faster. “I’m converting a stimulus [stress] that could be strengthening people into a source of disease.” With a breakthrough in her thinking, and some powerful new research, McGonigal made a complete turnaround. Turns out, stress might just be our friend. Just as you put stress on a muscle to make it stronger (by lifting weights or running), emotional stress can make us physically and psychologically stronger too. McGonigal now highlights new research showing that when you change your mind about stress, you can literally change your body’s physical reaction to it. In an eight-year study, adults who experienced a “lot of stress” and who believed stress was harmful to their health had a 43% increase in their risk of dying. (That sure stressed me out.) However, people who experienced an equal amount of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die! McGonigal says that physical signs of stress (a pounding heart, faster breathing, breaking out in a sweat) aren’t necessarily physical evidence of anxiety or signs that we aren’t coping well with pressure. Instead, we can interpret them as indications that our body is energized and preparing us to meet the next challenge. The bottom line is, science has now proven that how you think about stress matters—the story you attach to stress. Telling yourself it’s good for you instead of harmful could mean the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at 50 or living well into your 90s.
”
”
Anthony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom))
“
I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds.
They would have thought of themselves as grave, serious, concerned men—the words “caring” and “compassionate” would have been frequently on their lips. They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix, with white hair at the temples and rolled-up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens, a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent, a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson—the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement—as all their powers of technology and “compassion” could devise.
”
”
Walter Tevis (Mockingbird)
“
One of my colleagues in Duke, Ralph Keeney, noted that America's top killer isn't cancer or heart disease, nor is it smoking or obesity. It's our inability to make smart choices and overcome our own self-destructive behaviours. Ralph estimates that about half of us will make a lifestyle decision that will ultimately lead us to an early grave. And as if this were not bad enough, it seems that the rate at which we make these deadly decisions is increasing at an alarming pace.
I suspect that over the next few decades, real improvements in life expectancy and quality are less likely to be driven by medical technology than by improved decision making. Since focusing on long-term benefits is not our natural tendency, we need to more carefully examine the cases in which we repeatedly fail, and try to come up with some remedies for these situations. For an overweight movie loved, the key might be to enjoy watching a film while walking on the treadmill. The trick is to find the right behavioural antidote for each problem. By pairing something that we love with something that we dislike but that is good for us, we might be able to harness desire with outcome - and thus overcome some of the problems with self-control we face every day.
”
”
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
“
This Compost"
Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
2
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will
none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
”
”
Walt Whitman
“
Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch.60,61,62 Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease,63,64,65 exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans66 when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children.67 The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens.68 America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
The pacifist-humanitarian idea may indeed become an excellent one when the most superior type of manhood will have succeeded in subjugating the world to such an extent that this type is then sole master of the earth. This idea could have an injurious effect only in the measure in which its application became difficult and finally impossible.
So, first of all, the fight, and then pacifism. If it were otherwise, it would mean that mankind has already passed the zenith of its development, and accordingly, the end would not be the supremacy of some moral ideal, but degeneration into barbarism and consequent chaos.
People may laugh at this statement, but our planet moved through space for millions of years, uninhabited by men, and at some future date may easily begin to do so again, if men should forget that wherever they have reached a superior level of existence, it was not as a result of following the ideas of crazy visionaries but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron laws of Nature.
What reduces one race to starvation stimulates another to harder work.
All the great civilisations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.
The most profound cause of such a decline is to be found in the fact that the people ignored the principle that all culture depends on men, and not the reverse.
In other words, in order to preserve a certain culture, the type of manhood that creates such a culture must be preserved, but such a preservation goes hand in hand with the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure.
He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.
Such a saying may sound hard, but, after all, that is how the matter really stands. Yet far harder is the lot of him who believes that he can overcome Nature, and thus in reality insults her. Distress, misery, and disease, are her rejoinders.
Whoever ignores or despises the laws of race really deprives himself of the happiness to which he believes he can attain, for he places an obstacle in the victorious path of the superior race and, by so doing, he interferes with a prerequisite condition of, all human progress.
Loaded with the burden of human sentiment, he falls back to the level of a helpless animal.
It would be futile to attempt to discuss the question as to what race or races were the original champions of human culture and were thereby the real founders of all that we understand by the word ‘humanity.’
It is much simpler to deal with this question in so far as it relates to the present time. Here the answer is simple and clear.
Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes to-day, is almost, exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. All that we admire in the world to-day, its science and its art, its technical developments and discoveries, are the products of the creative activities of a few peoples, and it may be true that their first beginnings must be attributed to one race.
The existence of civilisation is wholly dependent on such peoples. Should they perish, all that makes this earth beautiful will descend with them into the grave.
He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth.
Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert.
”
”
Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
“
-Eternal Life-
I had a dream of a place where everything was at peace.
There was no more pain, no hurting or crying,
A place where death forever ceased.
There was no more hunger or disease
Nor, nations rising up against each other.
All pride and jealousy were swallowed up in the final battle.
The King has returned, so let us all rejoice.
We all gathered there to meet
As people assembled to pay homage at His feet.
Even the creatures on earth and in heaven came to proclaim
His eternal, sweet and precious name.
There we will reign with Him forevermore,
As we crowned Him King of kings and Lord of lords.
I am surrounded by thousands and thousands
Of angelic hosts singing His praises.
Oh, what a sweet sound which will continue throughout the ages.
I turned to see our loved ones who had gone on before us
We rejoiced with each other as we joined the endless chorus.
Our new bodies, how perfect we are designed.
Oh, the wisdom and knowledge of God
How unsearchable are His ways,
There will be joy and peace throughout the eternal days.
There in that holy place forever we will be,
The earth shall be full of His knowledge and glory
As waters that cover the sea.
When I woke up from that beautiful dream
I gave thanks to Jesus Christ my Savior, Who will forever reign supreme.
So, read to me the Word of Life page by page
God’s eternal love will never age.
I Corinthians 15: 51-55
Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last
trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this
mortal must put on immortality.
So, when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption,
and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be
brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed
up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
Romans 8: 18
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not
worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.
”
”
Shane Anders
“
Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.
The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war.
Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states".
A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives".
These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office.
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth.
In rather case the end is revolution.
When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease.
Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power.
But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy.
This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses.
As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course.
The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome).
The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage.
Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.
”
”
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers)
“
When one has not known anything but becomes infected with the ‘disease of knowing’; he is a grave diseased person. What is the result of knowing? One stops playing with the ‘tops’ [living as the relative-self] and starts playing with the Self [lives in the realm of the Self, The Soul]. The diseased one simply does the ego of knowing.
”
”
Dada Bhagwan (Simple & Effective Science for Self Realization)
“
Someday' is disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you..
”
”
Timothy Ferriss
“
Total T4/Total thyroxine = the amount of T4 bound to a carrier protein and the amount of unbound T4 in the blood. T4 is one-fifth to 1/10 as active as T3. T4 is converted into the more active T3 in the liver and kidneys. Total T3/Total triiodothyronine = the amount of T3 bound to a carrier protein and the amount of unbound T3 in the blood. FREE T3 = the amount of unbound T3 in blood. Low levels could mean an underactive thyroid. FREE T4 = the amount of unbound T4 in blood. Low levels could mean an underactive thyroid. Anti-TPO = anti-thyroid peroxidase (TPO). TPO is an enzyme needed to produce thyroid hormone. High levels of this antibody are an indication of an autoimmune disorder like Hashimoto’s or Graves disease.
”
”
Kate Deering (How to Heal Your Metabolism: Stop blaming aging for your slowing metabolism)
“
the Mediterranean region’s climate started to warm and become wetter starting 18,000 years ago, archaeological sites become more numerous and widespread, creeping into areas now occupied by the desert. The culmination of this population boom was a period called the Natufian, dated to between 14,700 and 11,600 years ago.7 The early Natufian was a sort of golden era of hunting and gathering. Thanks to a benevolent climate and many natural resources, the Natufians were fabulously wealthy by the standards of most hunter-gatherers. They lived by harvesting the abundant wild cereals that naturally grow in this region, and they also hunted animals, especially gazelle. The Natufians evidently had so much to eat that they were able to settle permanently in large villages, with as many as 100 to 150 people, building small houses with stone foundations. They also made beautiful art objects, such as bead necklaces and bracelets and carved figurines, they exchanged with distant groups for exotic shells, and they buried their dead in elaborate graves. If there ever was a Garden of Eden for hunter-gatherers, this must have been it. But then crisis struck 12,800 years ago. All of a sudden, the world’s climate deteriorated abruptly, perhaps because an enormous glacial lake in North America emptied suddenly into the Atlantic, temporarily disrupting the Gulf Stream and wreaking havoc with global weather patterns.8 This event, called the Younger Dryas,9 effectively plunged the world back into Ice Age conditions for hundreds of years. Imagine
”
”
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
“
If not immanence,
the soul's bright anchor--blood passed from one
to the other--what knowledge haunts each body,
what history, what phantom ache? One man always
low, in a grave or on the ground, the other
up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased,
the other a body in service, plundered.
”
”
Natasha Trethewey (Thrall)
“
A test for thyroid peroxidase antibodies (TPO Ab) is most important, as Hashimoto’s most commonly occurs when the immune system attacks TPO, an enzyme in the thyroid responsible for of thyroid hormone production.22 23 Sometimes a thyroglobulin antibodies (TGB Ab) test is necessary, since Hashimoto’s can follow a TGB attack.24 TGB is produced in the thyroid and is used by the gland to produce thyroid hormones. A test for thyroid stimulating hormone antibodies (TSH Ab) can identify Grave s’ disease (hyperthyroidism), although TSH Ab can also be elevated in Hashimoto’s. On lab tests, the TSH marker is commonly referred to as thyroid stimulating immunoglobulin (TSI). In severe autoimmune thyroid diseases, antibodies to T4 and T3 can develop.
”
”
Datis Kharrazian (Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms? When My Lab Tests Are Normal: A revolutionary breakthrough in understanding Hashimoto’s disease and hypothyroidism)
“
You may consider me sentimental or realistic since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies can develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible.
I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second in 2016, first causing esophagus damage and stomach hernia, and second metastatic prostate cancer.
I tried for years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write a report about that. Such refusal created doubts in my mind that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role in damaging and destroying my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing.
Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath, Miriam Sommer, in The Hague; after a month's discussion, she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue to suck, and I did that. However, later I became suspicious of why she did do that.
Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check what I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked it, and consequently, in February 2017, they diagnosed as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet International Medical Guidelines; they let the patients suffering from the disease and treat them in a gravely poor way, paying no proper care and attention. In this regard, I am unaware of others' experiences.
I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage and the destruction of my career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as guidelines before criminals disappear, can lead to a positive result; otherwise, I am right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
WHO recommended Hib vaccines only in nations suffering a grave disease burden.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
Noah would be dead if not for a trucker with Crohn’s disease taking the slow route so he could pull off and shit in a ditch if he needed to, out of sight of other motorists.
”
”
Tal Bauer (The Grave Between Us (A Noah & Cole Thriller, #2))
“
Revelation 6:7–8 (NLT): When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the fourth living being say, “Come!” I looked up and saw a horse whose color was pale green. Its rider was named Death, and his companion was the Grave. These two were given authority over one-fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword and famine and disease and wild animals.
”
”
Mark E. Fisher (Days of War and Famine (Days Of The Apocalypse #2))
“
Imagine that, surrounded by your loved ones, you and your disease-riddled body have finally just breathed your last. No, scratch that. It’s really much more vile than that, because, even though you still had much life left in you, you’ve just been put to death, and not just in the most painful of ways, but, treacherously, by those whom you thought truly loved you, or, if not that, then, at the least, valued and respected you!
Fortunately, or unfortunately, you disappear into the mists of time, and that means neither you nor your beloved face will ever be seen again. That one of those who had so cruelly abused you might ever try to track you down, or even be able to, is not possible, right? No, of course not, because, as we all know, birth is the beginning and death is the end of all that ever accidently took place in between.
Whether birth is the beginning and death actually the end, it certainly is how the badly disfigured, yet somehow still disturbingly alluring, Virginia Finsterwald thinks. So, when a dying lady shows up at her door - with a duplicate version of her own previously perfect face - it would be impossible for the former spy, now private detective, to take this event as anything more than mere Happenstance.
Meanwhile, just a couple of blocks up the way, Virginia’s principal patron is confronted by a woman who, inexplicably, has the exact face of his aunt, only, she had been lynched when he was a child! As a highly educated man who believes only in materials and reason, the only way Alistair Alligood, the a multi-zillionaire collector of gender-dysphorick pubescent boys, can prevent being undone by this unsettling matter is by writing it off, and yet:------does he really believe that such an occurrance is mere Happenstance?
Maybe so, but, what is not mere Happenstance are the church exorcists, psychicks, mesmerists, physicians, psychologists, and mediums who, when Alistair Alligood falls gravely ill, war with each other over whether he is bodily ill, suffering from past-life trauma, under a witch’s spell, and or is it that he has become demon possessed? What unravels behind the curtain of Alistair’s malady is a centuries’long tale of Poisonings, Duels, Rape, Revenge, Possession, the Black Arts, and Taboo Familial Doings, the seeds of which will miscegenize and explode in ’Beyond The Last Breath’.
”
”
Richarson-South
“
in the morning when it passed our hospital. We knew that brave and loyal hearts beat upon those decks, and that proud, stalwart men were there, the embodiment of love and courage in many a waiting heart, which, in its Northern home, prayed for the safe return of its idol. We knew that disease and death lurked for them in treacherous swamps, and on pine-clad hill slopes, whither they were going, and that many a grave in that now unbroken sod was waiting
”
”
Sophronia E. Bucklin (In Hospital and Camp)
“
Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General (1645 – 1647) by Stewart Stafford
‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ – Exodus,
Nor allow legalised killing too cheaply,
Twenty shillings of blood money per witch,
A charlatan’s extortion for ‘cleansing.’
Witchcraft, the capital crime of the age,
Lawyer Hopkins, parasitising laws,
Self-appointed Witchfinder General,
A reign of terror brought to God-fearing doors.
Evildoing’s hunter was its embodiment;
A Judas purse wed brutality’s handmaiden,
With Stearne, stoked Essex witch hunt mania,
Puritanical zeal’s sadistic cruelty.
His victims were cast into dungeon pits;
Bloodied and broken in outcast desperation;
Disease helped some cheat the hangman;
The only fortune anyone deemed fair.
Extracting confessions through torture’s pain;
Their skin pricked to find Satan’s mark,
Victims, forced to run until collapse,
Sleepless starvation hastened their bleak end.
Then to the wicked ducking stool gauntlet,
Lowered into muddy ditches or icy water,
A survivor’s noose or drowned exoneration?
None met the Witchfinder’s imperious eyes.
“I, John Lowes, a minister of God,
Was martyred so. Hopkins, thou pestilent knave!
Bade me to run, held aloft by mocking hands,
Funeral rites as I dug mine own grave.”
Sensing his gaslit flames turn back on him,
Hopkins went to ground with his ill-gotten gains,
Slowly he faded, from infamous to obscure,
Scars linger on 300 unmarked graves.
Some say that Hopkins was executed as a witch,
Or faced a tubercular end in his village,
Where he is buried, no one knows or cares,
Hexed in a barren field for karmic tillage.
Rat-catcher to an imagined pestilence,
Communities, not covens, he did churn,
A toxic chalice for New World lips,
Fanning Salem’s pernicious turn.
© 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
The Greeks differentiated between types of desire. They had a concept called eros, a longing for something, which is never really fulfilled—wanting more and more. The Prophet said, “Nothing will fill the mouth of the son of Adam except the soil of his own grave. If he had one mountain of gold, he will only desire a second.” The Prophet also said, “Two people will never be satiated: seekers of knowledge and seekers of the world.” Covetousness, if it is not for God and His religion, will be for worldly things.
”
”
Hamza Yusuf (Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart)
“
Love is a grave mental disease.
”
”
B. Ashiedu (Quotes About Love:365 Love Quotes (Quotes On Love, Love Quotes Books, Inspirational Quotes))
“
People high in conscientiousness get better grades in high school and college; they commit fewer crimes; and they stay married longer. They live longer—and not just because they smoke and drink less. They have fewer strokes, lower blood pressure, and a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. “It would actually be nice if there were some negative things that went along with conscientiousness,” Roberts told me. “But at this point it’s emerging as one of the primary dimensions of successful functioning across the lifespan. It really goes cradle to grave in terms of how well people do.
”
”
Paul Tough (How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character)
“
The Cherokees had 1,200 miles to go before they reached eastern Oklahoma, the end of the trek they would forever be remembered as the Trail of Tears. As their homeland disappeared behind them, the cold autumn rains continued to fall, bringing disease and death. Four thousand shallow graves marked the trail. Marauding parties of white men appeared, seized Cherokee horses in payment for imaginary debts, and rode off. The Indians pressed on, the sullen troopers riding beside them. They
”
”
Robert M. Utley (American Heritage History of the Indian Wars)
“
Americans know they’re overweight. In fact, we spend huge amounts of money on diet books and diet programs to help us lose that burdensome extra weight. There are more than 30,000 fitness clubs in the United States, all aimed at serving the national desire to lose weight and be fit. And it’s not just a question of being a little too heavy, or of how we look. Nutrition is one of the most significant factors in society’s major killers, like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Most of us are literally digging our graves with our teeth. And we know all this—yet clearly the majority of us aren’t doing anything about it. Why not?
”
”
Jeff Olson (The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness)
“
…my loved one was a bee and a butterfly and knew how to cut with her claws and her tongue, and I tried too … we learned from each other what was good for the other, and that made both of us stronger … running, and the earth turned beneath us, running by graves and leaping across them, avoiding the bones and glassy stares and empty eyesockets … of wolf skulls … and steering clear of traps and snares, we had experience … with falling stakes and poisoned meat … we made it without harm through the red pack's territory … and met the last of the white wolves, they were wracked with disease … and the big black wolves chased us, but we escaped … we, the gray wolves of the Carpathians, had an age-old war with them, they were surprised we fled, their jaws snapping shut on empty air, they had a hunch it was their turn next, the helicopters were on the way … we ran side by side, our bodies touching … running over the earth as it turned, with the wind whistling in our ears like a lament for every dead pack … and the clicking of our claws made the earth's motion accelerate … we ran over the earth, a mass grave, running away …
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Jáchym Topol (City Sister Silver)
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He watched the old man pick up his naked, violated daughter from where she lay in the dirt. He held her in his arms, her limbs lolling, his head bent to hers as if in silent prayer. He was going to bury her, bury his daughter, perhaps in a peaceful place, and he would say a prayer to his gods over her grave. He would visit his daughter’s grave in the months afterwards, until he too succumbed to disease, overwork or torture. People said slaves did not have souls and were a step removed from people. Zachary watched the old black man in ragged clothes walk away with his dead daughter. In that instant, the differences between Bonnie Valley and Paradise became excuses, mere matters of degree, the difference between twenty-nine strokes of the cowskin lash and thirty strokes, the difference between a bed and a filthy floor after torture, between rape and rape, death now and death tomorrow. There was no difference.
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Diana McCaulay (Huracan)
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Nearly all diseases that have baffled the medical profession may be traced to some deficiency in our diet, and it may be truthfully said, that at least ninety per cent of human ailments are traceable to inadequate and faulty nutrition. Yet in no part of study and observation has medical need been more insufficiently met than in that of rational dietetics, both in relation to the maintenance of health, and in the treatment and prevention of disease. By far the most detrimental effect of faulty nutrition is the result of habitual errors of one kind or another, which are not sufficiently grave to command immediate attention. For instance, we may abuse our pancreas and kidneys for years, without the feeling of pain, until these organs are finally injured beyond repair. It is the gradual operation of more or less constant, but unperceived causes, rather than of accidental exposures to abnormal conditions, which in most cases are responsible for undermining the health of the individual
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Anonymous
“
Cassava No man had touched her, but a boy-child grew in the belly of the chief’s daughter. They called him Mani. A few days after birth he was already running and talking. From the forest’s farthest corners people came to meet the prodigious Mani. Mani caught no disease, but on reaching the age of one, he said, “I’m going to die,” and he died. A little time passed, and on Mani’s grave sprouted a plant never before seen, which the mother watered every morning. The plant grew, flowered, and gave fruit. The birds that picked at it flew strangely, fluttering in mad spirals and singing like crazy. One day the ground where Mani lay split open. The chief thrust his hand in and pulled out a big, fleshy root. He grated it with a stone, made a dough, wrung it out, and with the warmth of the fire cooked bread for everyone. They called the root mani oca, “house of Mani,” and manioc is its name in the Amazon basin and other places. (174)
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Eduardo Galeano (Genesis (Memory of Fire Book 1))
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When you come from a long line of suffering, there be no way to kid youself ‘bout its poison, how it get in the veins of families an from generation to generation be passed on like some horrible disease. I think white folk ofttimes can kid theyselves into thinking that such an act begin an end in juss one place. Or maybe they juss be so ‘fraid of what all that mean, they be able to convince theyselves somethun be true when they know deep down it ain’t. But when you come from a people who have suffered for generations, such lying to youself juss make things worse. Fo’ that poison can reach a point where they be no way to end its taint, an then people die; even if they don’ be a lying down in they graves, they be dead to life, an love, beauty an God. Yes, indeed, yes indeed they be. Miss Imogene
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Christina Carson (Where It Began: Book One: Accidents of Birth Trilogy)
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Cadmus carried a polished box containing two pistols bequeathed to the captain by his commanding officer during the Seminole Wars in the Everglades. Pencarrow hadn’t fired the antiques for years, favoring instead the small revolver given him by General John Quitman during the Mexican War. But pistols were the least of Pencarrow’s worries as the sun began to sink toward the Mississippi River. He shivered in the grip of what the doctors called National Hotel disease, an affliction he’d acquired while attending President Buchanan’s inauguration dinner in Washington with General Quitman. Quitman had already died from a relapse, and after several similar episodes, Pencarrow feared that he too was soon for the grave. But he did not intend to sleep there tonight.
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Greg Iles (Southern Man (Penn Cage #7))
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Meanwhile,” adds Dr. Brownstein, “we’ve seen lots of really bad vaccine side effects in our patients. We’ve had seven strokes—some ending in severe paralysis. We had three cases of pulmonary embolism, two blood clots, two cases of Graves’ disease, and one death.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Amor Mašović, the president of the Bosnian government’s Commission for Tracing Missing Persons, confirms that there are hundreds of undiscovered mass graves. To this day, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is helping identify dead bodies from such mass graves, using technologies such as DNA testing. As many as 150 prisoners were killed every single night in Omarska Camp. Estimates from the United States also suggest that, at a minimum, several hundreds of civilians were murdered during the camp’s evacuation period. Actual numbers are likely to be much higher.
All the toilets in the camp were blocked. There were human feces throughout the area. The prisoners’ extremely deplorable and terrifying conditions were confirmed by a British journalist named Ed Vulliamy in a testimony. He also mentioned that the detainees consumed water from an industrially polluted river causing them severe diarrhea and intestinal diseases. There were zero criminal reports filed against the Serb perpetrators. The victims were constantly subjected to abuse resulting in serious psychological and physical deterioration.
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Aida Mandic
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Mathematician Norbert Wiener employed an even more bizarre set of bodily feelings. After spending months working fruitlessly on a difficult problem that led him into controversy with his Harvard colleagues, Wiener became gravely ill with pneumonia. Throughout the course of the feverish disease his mind conflated bodily discomfort with mental anxiety. “It was impossible for me to distinguish among my pain and difficulty in breathing, the flapping of the window curtain, and certain as yet unresolved parts of the potential problem on which I was working.
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Robert Root-Bernstein (Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People)
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he fell ill with a disease that only the grave can cure
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José Rizal (Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not))
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Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch.60,61,62 Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease,63,64,65 exploded from between 2/10,000 and
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Snobbery is a grave disease, but it is localised and so does not utterly corrupt the soul.
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Marcel Proust (A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. La Prisonnière. Tome 6. Volume 1)
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Unless you fix the disease and not just the symptoms, the cancer’s just gonna keep spreadin’,
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Denise Grover Swank (One Foot in the Grave (Carly Moore, #3))
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Happiness is not lame sex with diseased dickheads from the internet with no social or sexual charisma, whose entire personality is PureGym, and then finding yourself constantly dashing off to 56 Dean Street to make sure you haven't contracted chlamydia or worse. Happiness is not the School of Oriental and African Studies, or the Royal African Society, or any Africanists and Orientalists who schlep to cities like Kolkata and Kampala, and find endlessly inventive ways to weaponise their whiteness by explaining decolonisation to folks their own ancestors are still fucking over from beyond the grave.
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Diriye Osman
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Habitat. The environmental niche occupied by a plant reflects stresses and conditions which it has had to adapt to, and these often correspond to conditions in the organism. Plants which grow in wet situations often relate to organ systems which handle dampness in the body, such as the lymphatics and kidneys. They correspond to diseases produced by an excess of dampness—respiratory problems, mucus, lymphatic stagnation, swollen glands, kidney and bladder problems, intermittent fever and rheumatic complaints (rheuma = dampness in Greek). Here we think of Horsetail (low, wet sands/kidneys), Eryngo (salty, sandy seashores/kidneys), Gravel Root (swamps/kidneys), Swamp Milkweed (swamps/kidneys), Hydrangea (sides of streams/kidneys), Boneset (wet soils/joints and fever), Willow (low ground/joints and fever), Meadowsweet (low ground/rheumatic pains, intermittent fever), Northern White Cedar (cedar swamps and margins of lakes/lymphatics), Labrador Tea (cedar swamps and margins of lakes/lymphatics), various Knotweeds (low ground/kidneys), Sweet Flag (swamps/mucus, lungs and joints), Angelica (damp, shady, cool valleys/damp, cold rheumatic and respiratory conditions). It is interesting to note that sandy, gravely soils are also a signature for kidney remedies (Horsetail, Eryngo, Gravel Root, Gromwell, False Gromwell, Uva ursi, etc.)
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Matthew Wood (The Book of Herbal Wisdom: Using Plants as Medicines)
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Men dig their graves with their own teeth and die by those fated instruments more than the weapons of their enemies.
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Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)
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Is it still difficult to see the spiritual core of addictions? Here are some simple questions that might expose it: While you struggled with addiction, was it ever accompanied by the fear of the Lord? Did you ever have a keen sense of the presence and holiness of God when you struggled with addictions? Did you ever have a sense that you were spiritually growing in repentance, faith, and obedience while in your addiction? When we have a disease, we can still be growing in the knowledge of Christ, but addictions are incompatible with spiritual growth.
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Edward T. Welch (Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave)
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You may consider me as a sentimental one or a realistic one since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies have the capability, to develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible.
I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second 2016, first caused esophagus damage and stomach hernia and second metastatic prostate cancer.
I tried years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write the report about that. Such refusal created in my mind doubts that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role to damage and destroy my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing.
Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath Miriam Sommer in The Hague, after a month discussing she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage, and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue, to suck, I did that; however, later I became suspicious, why she did that? -
Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check up that I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked, and consequently, February 2017, they diagnose as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet the International Medical Guidelines, they let the patient suffering from the disease and treat it with a gravely cheap way, paying no proper care and attention. I am unaware of others' experiences in this regard.
I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage, and destruction of career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as my guidelines before criminals disappear that can lead to a positive result. Otherwise, I will be right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights.
- Ehsan Sehgal
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
All organs of one's body, if becoming ill, mostly that neither abstract nor accept the medicinal chemicals; consequently, such a patient faces grave mental conflict and severe health damage from that. Factually, natural herbs can be significantly best and effective for all diseases, in all dimensions and stages if one carries out that accurately.
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
New state decrees included provisions that the dead be unceremoniously disinfected, packed into double body bags, and hastily buried—normally in unmarked graves—by officially appointed gravediggers wearing protective equipment. This new regulation prevented family members and friends from honoring loved ones, and it negated religious observance. The discovery of a body by a search team thus furnished ample potential for physical confrontations, just as a similar decree had led to clashes in plague-stricken Bombay in 1897–1898. This tense atmosphere was inflamed by multiple conspiracy theories. One Canadian reporter wrote that people “tell me stories about witchcraft, Ebola witch guns, crazy nurses injecting neighbours with Ebola and government conspiracies.”29 Untori, or plague spreaders, were said to be at work, as in the days of the Black Death described by Alessandro Manzoni. Some regarded health-care workers as cannibals or harvesters of body parts for the black market in human organs. The state, rumor also held, had embarked on a secret plot to eliminate the poor. Ebola perhaps was not a disease but a mysterious and lethal chemical. Alternatively, the ongoing land grab was deemed to have found ingenious new methods. Perhaps whites were orchestrating a plan to kill African blacks, or mine owners had discovered a deep seam of ore nearby and wanted to clear the surrounding area.
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Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
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As early as the 1830s, missionaries in the Society Islands were already beginning to speak of depopulation. There were major epidemics in Tahiti of smallpox in 1841, dysentery in 1843, scarlet fever in 1847, measles in 1854. Much the same story can be told of Hawai‘i, which was also subject to wave after wave of imported disease. In 1848 and 1849, when Pinao was pregnant with her first child, a series of devastating epidemics struck the Hawaiian Islands. Measles, arriving from Mexico on an American frigate, and whooping cough, on a ship from California, hit at the same time, killing an estimated ten thousand people. Whole villages were prostrate, wrote one observer, “there not being persons enough in health to prepare food for the sick,” while “a large portion of the infants born in the Islands in 1848, even as large a proportion as nine-tenths in some parts, are supposed to be already in their graves.” No doubt there were other diseases in the mix as well; mumps, which had been in the islands some years earlier, was reported again, as were “pleurisy,” “bilious fever,” and something that was probably dysentery. The combined assault was especially hard upon the very young and the very old. “The aged,” wrote one observer, “have almost all disappeared from among us.
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Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
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Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.
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Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
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We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.
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Wendell Berry (It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays)
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thousand witches?” Marie asked. “That seems…steep.” “A thousand victims. Precious few of them could tell the difference between a supernatural hex and a bad dream brought on by undercooked sausage, I assure you. But when war and disease are on the doorstep and the wolves are circling, people crave simple answers, simple solutions. Life is bad? Find a witch to blame for it. Your life isn’t magically better after you murder her? Well, obviously there are more witches out there. Keep hunting.
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Craig Schaefer (Sworn to the Night (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy, #1))
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The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up all the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.
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Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
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When infected people use Tamiflu as medication, it will cause more deaths than necessary. The culprits of this disease will use the fatal results of Tamiflu as proof that there is grave danger with the Bird Flu virus.
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Robin de Ruiter (The 13 Satanic Bloodlines Paving the Road to Hell)
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These are our strength, who strike against history.
These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness to our diseases;
these carrying light for safety on their foreheads
descended deeper for richer faults of ore,
drilling their death.
These touching radium and the luminous poison,
carried their death on their lips and with their warning
glow in their graves.
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Muriel Rukeyser (The Book of the Dead)