Syphilis Quotes

If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

Will: "Nice place to live, isn't it? Let's hope they left something behind other than filth. Forwarding addresses, a few severed limbs, a prostitute or two ..." Jem: "Indeed. Perhaps, if we're fortunate, we can still catch syphilis." "Or demon pox," Will suggested cheerfully, trying the door under the stairs.

All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence. "I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

You don't want him," she said to the pink-haired girl. "He has syphilis." The girls stared. "Syphilis?" "Five percent of people in America have it," said Ty helpfully. "I do not have syphilis," Mark said angrily. "There are no sexually transmitted diseases in Faerieland!" "Sorry," Jules said. "You know how syphilis is. Attacks the brain.

Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis

I mean, there is a reason its initials are VD. I bet you more people contract syphilis on Valentine's Day than on any other day of the year. What a cause for celebration.

Jem raised his hand, and his witchlight flared into life, frightening a group of blackbeetles. They scurried across the floor, causing Will to grimace. “Nice place to live, isn’t it? Let’s hope they left something behind other than filth. Forwarding addresses, a few severed limbs, a prostitute or two…” “Indeed. Perhaps, if we’re fortunate, we can still catch syphilis.” “Or demon pox,” Will suggested cheerfully, trying the door under the stairs. It swung open, unlocked as the front door had been. “There’s always demon pox.” “Demon pox does not exist.” “Oh ye of little faith,” said Will, disappearing into the darkness under the stairs.

i would like to remind the management that the drinks are watered and the hat-check girl has syphilis and the band is composed of former ss monsters However since it is new year's eve and i have lip cancer i will place my paper hat on my concussion and dance

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.' 'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome," he said.

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

Syphilis. Lots and lots of magically delicious Syphilis.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.

Isn't there something in living dangerously?' There's a great deal in it,' the Controller replied. 'Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.' What?' questioned the Savage, uncomprehending. It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.' V.P.S.?' Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconvenience.' But I like the inconveniences.' We don't,' said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.' But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.' In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. I claim them all,' said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.

Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.

There’s no reason to live, but there’s no reason to die, either. The only way we can still show our contempt for life is to accept it. Life is not worth the bother of leaving it. Out of charity, one might spare a few individuals the trouble of living, but what about oneself? Despair, indifference, betrayal, fidelity, solitude, the family, freedom, weight, money, poverty, love, absence of love, syphilis, health, sleep, insomnia, desire, impotence, platitudes, art, honesty, dishonor, mediocrity, intelligence – nothing there to make a fuss about. We know only too well what those things are made of, no point in watching for them.

Yes, one of the benefits of being embarrassingly rich is that you find out if you have syphilis much earlier than the average peasant would.

Just as I opened the door, and before I could talk myself out of it, I mouthed, “I deserve better, asshole,” making sure he read my lips as I did it. Then I raised my middle finger up at him and waved good-bye with it. I hope they both got syphilis.

You want sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

He has kind of a homicidal face. Or is that just syphilis making him insane? British monarchs do love their syphilis." "A prerequisite of the job," he agreed.

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics. I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis!

To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Gauguin was a stockbroker in Paris, married, had five kids. One day he came home from work and told his wife he was leaving, that he was through supporting the family, that he had had enough. Just like that he fucking took off. He said he had always felt that he was a painter, so he moved to a rat-infested shithole and started painting. His wife begged him to come back, his bosses told him he was insane, he didn't care, he was following his heart. He left Paris, moved to Rouen, went from Rouen to Arles, from Arles to Tahiti. He was searching for peace, contentment, trying to fill that fucking hole he felt inside, and he believed he could fill it. He died in Tahiti, blind and crazy from syphilis, but he did it. He filled his fucking hole, made beautiful work, made beautiful, beautiful work... It takes a brave man to walk away, to care so much that he doesn't care about anything else, to be willing to obey what he feels inside, to be willing to suffer the consequences of living for himself. Every time I stand before his work it makes me cry, and I cry because I'm proud of him, and happy for him, and because I admire him.

You don't want to sit by me?" Rafe called to her with a grin. "No, I don't," Layla said. "I wouldn't sit by you if every other seat in the room was on fire." "Ouch." Rafe winced, then rebounded with a sleazy smile. "That would hurt me if I believed it. You know you're curious to go for a ride." "About as curious as I am to get syphilis," Layla snapped.

Piers looked up at him. 'You're new. What's your name?' 'Neythen, my lord.' 'Sounds like a terrible illness. No, more like a bowel problem. I'm sorry, Lord Sandys, your son has contracted neythen and won't live a month. No, no, there's nothing I can do. Sandys would have preferred hearing that to syphilis.

Liberalism is moral syphilis. And I'm stepping over it.

Heart disease syphilis pregnancy All you creeps on the street get away from me

If you're looking for sympathy, you'll find it in the dictionary, somewhere between 'shit' and 'syphilis'.

You don't want him," she said to the pink-haired girl. "He has syphilis." The girl stared. "Syphilis?" "Five percent of people in America have it," said Ty helpfully. "I do not have syphilis," Mark said angrily. "There are no sexually transmitted diseases in Faerieland!" The mundane girls fell instantly silent.

In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.

Speak to me of heroin and speed / Of genocide and suicide, of syphilis and greed

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that i expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated." Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm. It is amusing that, when Henry, Fred, and I talked together, we fell back into a deep naturalness. Perhaps none of us is a sensational character. Or perhaps we have no need of condiments. Henry is, in reality, mild not temperamental; gentle not eager for scenes. We may all write about sadism, masochism, the grand quignol, bubu de montparnasse (in which the highest proof of love is for a pimp to embrace his woman's syphilis as fervently as herself, a noblesse-oblige of the apache world), cocteau, drugs, insane asylums, house of the dead, because we love strong colors; and yet when we sit in the cafe de la place clichy, we talk about henry's last pages, and a chapter which was too long, and richard's madness. "One of his greatest worries," said Henry, "was to have introduced us. He thinks you are wonderful and that you may be in danger from the 'gangster author.

I even stopped walking to give some thought to the fact that everyone, after all, wants to be himself, so I too want to be myself, for example who would love syphilis, of course no one loves syphilis, but after all, a syphilitic man also wants to be himself, namely a syphilitic, it is easy to say "I want to be well again," and yet it sounds strange, as if to say "I don't want to be who I am.

You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it's all downhill.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

I’m not friends with Adam. Trust me, that man is as useful as a tape worm and as appealing as a raging case of syphilis.

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness. “According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.

No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’ In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances… and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.' 'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome," he said.

In defense of King, country, and family, he would unhesitatingly have sacrificed his virtue to Nessie, had that been required. If it was a question of Olivia marrying a man with syphilis and half the British army being exterminated in battle, versus himself experiencing a "personal interview" with Richard Caswell, though, he rather thought Olivia and the King had best look to their own devices.

But behind every misguided treatment—from Ottomans eating clay to keep the plague away to Victorian gents sitting in a mercury steam room for their syphilis to epilepsy sufferers sipping gladiator blood in ancient Rome—is the incredible power of the human desire to live.

A Manhattan lawyer who describes himself as "America`s leading expert on the militia movement" writes that he hugged his three-year-old kid the night of the Oklahoma City bombing. He told junior that it happened "because they hated too much" For now, let`s accept the premise that one hundred sixty-eight humans died in Oklahoma City because people "hated too much" Now answer these questions if you would be so kind: did a federal sniper shoot Vicki Weaver in the face because he hated too much? Did our government conduct the Tuskegee with syphilis on black soldiers because it hated too much?

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.

HELA CELLS ARE GROWN Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.

Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.

When I think back, I get mad at what they did to those poor men. Ernie must have had PTSD—they called it shell shock—and the doctors told him to keep it all bottled up inside. They didn’t know any better, but it was like treating syphilis with candy bars.

After a lie truth bursts out, and it is no longer the radiant and serene goddess knew or hoped for—it is a disease, it is a moral syphilis and will ravage until the body in which it can dwell has been purged.

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.

and Grenouille’s mother, who was still a young woman, barely in her mid-twenties, and who still was quite pretty and had almost all her teeth in her mouth and some hair on her head and – except for gout and syphilis and a touch of consumption – suffered from no serious disease, who still hoped to live a while yet, perhaps a good five or ten years, and perhaps even to marry one day and as the honorable wife of a widower with a trade or some such to bear real children... Grenouille’s mother wished that it were already over.

In the struggle to cure syphilis in the first decade of the century, Paul Ehrlich concocted a drug, 606, that worked by poisoning Treponema pallidum, the spirochete that causes syphilis. It was called 606 because before it Ehrlich concocted 605 other drugs, none of which worked. Ehrlich, presumably, experienced 605 defeats but persisted.

Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you. Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn't it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet? Yes, we've ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we're always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we're getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we've got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely- the statistics say you're more likely to be killed by lightning- a person. But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It's always the Apocalypse. The world hasn't gone to shit. The world is shit. All I'd asked was that it be better managed.

Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany – "Fay ce que vouldras!… fay ce que vouldras!"; Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy!

Oh no.' Straight raised his eyes to me, and a slight smile touched the corners of his lips. 'A philosophy of life is more terrible than syphilis and people - you have to give them credit - take every precaution not to become infected. Especially by a philosophy of life.

If you want sympathy you should look between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

Imagine you are a pregnant young woman with tuberculosis. The father of your unborn child is a short-tempered alcoholic with syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. You have already had five kids. One is blind, another died young, and a third is deaf and unable to speak. The fourth has tuberculosis—the same disease you have. What would you do in this situation? Should you consider abortion? If you chose to have the abortion, you would have ended a valuable human being—regardless of the possible difficulties it may have brought you. Fortunately, the young woman who was really in this dilemma chose life. Otherwise we would never have heard the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven, for this young woman was his mother.

Well, listen, sweetheart. Boys only want one thing, of course, and guess what that means for you? Heartbreak. Pregnancy. Chlamydia, herpes, syphilis, crabs. That’s beautiful, Dad. You should set it to music.

If you believe the many biographies of great men and women, none of them ever had syphilis. Which would be a remarkable stroke of luck on their part. Since its discovery in Barcelona in 1493—supposedly brought back from the New World—the sexually transmitted disease just mowed down Europeans. Its effects were so devastating that some regard it as an equal trade for the measles and the smallpox Europeans exported to the Americas.

they brought the Bible and syphilis, they made people believe that life was easy, mother, that everything is gotten with money, that blacks carry a contagion, they tried to convince our soldiers that the nation is a business and that the sense of honor is a brother invented by the government so that soldiers would fight for free

In 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate the mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. More recently, even Richard Branson felt compelled to pen an article about Cuba’s extraordinary medical achievements and how the idiotic embargo prevents ordinary Americans from benefiting from Cuba’s medical innovations.

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis...

I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did—someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity. I was wrong; it was more a book about interior decoration. In his free moments from plumbing the subrational depths of upholstery, the main character devoted himself to the preparation of all-black meals, to hanging out with a jewel-encrusted tortoise, and thinking thoughts like, “All is syphilis.” How was that an aesthetic life?

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had any time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

He adds, wistfully, "I don't suppose you have syphilis, do you?" "No." "Pity. There's a study starting in Alabama that would have paid for all your medical care if you did. Although you'd have to be a Negro." "I'm not that, either." "Too bad." The doctor shrugs.

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, you life becomes less about living and more about waiting. For cancer. For dementia. Every look in a mirror, you scan for the red rash that means shingles. See also: Ringworm. See also: Lyme disease, meningitis, rheumatic fever, syphilis.

Time heals all wounds. Time is of the essence. Time is short. Time is on my side. Lies. All lies. Time is the enemy. Time was playing for the other team. Timed stretched like an endless desert. The only thing time does is stagger along like a drunk sailor and give you wrinkles. And syphilis.

Under the influence of mercury, which he administered to himself daily as a salve for his syphilis, & laudanum, which he drank each evening in imprecisely measured amounts to enable him to sleep, because of all things, this brave man feared only his dreams, opiate-enhanced nightmares that gave him no respite & which always ended in flames from which he rose phoenix-like just before dawn each morning, to recommence building what was already ash.

Why is it a shame for me to cause them to die and try to exterminate them, tell me? You did not talk that way when you used to come to my house in Jeanne-d'Arc street. Ah! it is a shame! You have not done as much, with your cross of honor! I deserve more merit than you, do you understand, more than you, for I have killed more Prussians than you!

You know what they say about sympathy...it's in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.

Nature: that lovely lady to whom we owe polio, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, cancer.

The white race is in its decline. We started downhill in 1492 when Columbus discovered syphilis.

... because I happen to think - this is just my personal opinion - that the only lower form of life than a man who would beat up a woman is a rat with syphilis.

...And where's Margaret Pier? I know she's not dead, even if she's almost as old as I am and twice as stubborn." "She said she'd never set foot inside this house again. Not after what you said the last time." "Did I say something dreadful?" "You said blind Republicanism like hers was an inherited social disease, like syphilis. You said it. I heard you myself.

The Mexicans gave the Spaniards malaria, and the Spaniards gave the Mexicans smallpox, whooping cough, diphtheria, and syphilis. The Spaniards believed it was better to give than to receive.

In Georgian England, sweeps and climbing-boys were regarded as general cesspools of disease—dirty, consumptive, syphilitic, pox-ridden—and a “ragged, ill-looking sore,” easily attributed to some sexually transmitted illness, was usually treated with a toxic mercury-based chemical and otherwise shrugged off. (“Syphilis,” as the saying ran, “was one night with Venus, followed by a thousand nights with mercury.”)

The symptoms syphilis engendered worsened over time. In addition to the unsightly skin ulcers that pockmarked the body in the later stages of the disease, many victims endured paralysis, blindness, dementia, and “saddle nose,” a grotesque deformity that occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face. (Syphilis was so common that “no nose clubs” sprang up all over London. One newspaper reported that “an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.” The man, who assumed the alias of Mr. Crampton for these clandestine parties, entertained his noseless friends every month for a year until his death, at which time the group “unhappily dissolved.”)

For a similar example in humans, we have only to consider the surprising evolution of syphilis. Today, our two immediate associations to syphilis are genital sores and a very slowly developing disease, leading to the death of many untreated victims only after many years. However, when syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall off people’s faces, and led to death within a few months. By 1546, syphilis had evolved into the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today. Apparently, just as with myxomatosis, those syphilis spirochetes that evolved so as to keep their victims alive for longer were thereby able to transmit their spirochete offspring into more victims.

This portrait of a young woman is housed in the Louvre and is traditionally attributed to Leonardo. The painting’s title, applied as early as the seventeenth century, identifies the sitter as the wife or daughter of an ironmonger (a ferronnier). Some historians believe the title alludes to a reputed mistress of Francis I of France, who was married to a certain Le Ferron. According to a Romantic legend of revenge, the aggrieved husband Francis intentionally infected himself with syphilis, which he passed to the king through infecting his wife.

the history of experimenting on black people does not hold a place in their referential memory.5 No one makes mention of Tuskegee’s syphilis experiments on black men, or the military experiments of mustard gas on black soldiers, among other nonwhites, or J. Marion Sims’s experimentation on black women.6 No mention of Henrietta Lacks. My historical memory starts tossing examples at me as if it’s having its own dinner party. In the real one, no one wonders what the parents of the black children think when they see the word “study” associated with the center.

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.

One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood County Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twientieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling. “You have to know, I never had syphilis!

So in 1932, the US Public Health Service began its “Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male.” Government researchers promised free medical care to six hundred syphilis-infected sharecroppers around Tuskegee, Alabama. They secretly withheld treatment to these men and waited for their deaths, so they could perform autopsies. Researchers wanted to confirm their hypothesis that syphilis damaged the neurological systems of Whites, while bypassing Blacks “underdeveloped” brains and damaging their cardiovascular systems instead. The study was not halted until the press exposed it in 1972.

That which makes me shudder when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: "Mondays and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis." In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with "De f endez-vous contre la syphilis!" Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.

In addition to these physical problems, sexually transmitted diseases are rampant among the homosexual population. 75% of homosexual men carry one or more sexually transmitted diseases, wholly apart from AIDS. These include all sorts of non-viral infections like gonorrhea, syphilis, bacterial infections, and parasites. Also common among homosexuals are viral infections like herpes and hepatitis B (which afflicts 65% of homosexual men), both of which are incurable, as well as hepatitis A and anal warts, which afflict 40% of homosexual men. And I haven’t even included AIDS. Perhaps the most shocking and frightening statistic is that, leaving aside those who die from AIDS, the life expectancy for a homosexual male is about 45 years of age. That compares to a life expectancy of around 70 for men in general. If you include those who die of AIDS, which now infects 30% of homosexual men, the life expectancy drops to 39 years of age. So I think a very good case can be made out on the basis of generally accepted moral principles that homosexual behavior is wrong. It is horribly self-destructive and injurious to another person. Thus, wholly apart from the Bible’s prohibition, there are sound, sensible reasons to regard homosexual activity as wrong.

Freneuse is an oddball, an idler, without any aim in life! If you ask me, he has smoked too much opium in the East, and that explains his somnolence, his morbid lethargies. It's the hazardous legacy of bad habits! He has been comprehensively undone; the heavy influence of poisonous opiates never ceases to oppress him. Besides which, his steel-blue eyes are surely the eyes of a smoker of opium. He carries the drunken burden of hemp in his veins. Opium is like syphilis' - le Mazel released the word carelessly - 'it is a thing which stays for years and years in the blood, because the body is unable to purge itself. It must be absorbed, in the long run, by iodide.

Any animal can fuck. But only humans can experience sexual passion, something wholly different from the biological urge to mate. And sexual passion’s endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life — not despite impediments but because of them. Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double-edged character — meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose. History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalric chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… from the Victorians’ dread of the body to early TV’s one-foot-on-the-floor-at-all-times rule; from the automatic ruin of “fallen” women to back-seat tussles in which girlfriends struggled to deny boyfriends what they begged for in order to preserve their respect. Granted, from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel. But we need to realize that they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically, human sexuality has been a deadly serious business — and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose." -from "Back in New Fire

Because radium can be mixed with other elements to make them glow in the dark, clock makers used it to create fluorescent numbers on watch faces and hired young women to perform the delicate task of painting them. In the watch factories of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois, the Radium Girls were trained to lick the tips of their brushes into a fine point before dipping them into pots of radium paint. When the jaws and skeletons of the first girls began to rot and disintegrate, their employers suggested they were suffering from syphilis. A successful lawsuit revealed that their managers had understood the risks of working with radium and get done everything they could to conceal the truth from their employees. It was the first time the public learned the hazards of ingesting radioactive material. The

Dr. Knef was a medical man through and through. When Mollie Maggia’s jawbone had so shockingly broken against his fingers, he had been fascinated by it—so he had kept it, this oddly moth-eaten, misshapen piece of bone. Every now and again, after her death, he had examined it, turning it over in his hands, but he was none the wiser; anyway, she had died of syphilis, whatever the strangeness of her bones. He’d therefore popped the fragment into his desk drawer, where he kept his x-ray negatives, and eventually it slipped his mind. And then, one day, his duties had required him to dig through that crowded desk drawer for the x-ray films. He had scrambled through the bits and pieces he kept in there, searching for them. To his astonishment, when he finally pulled them out, the films were no longer ebony black. Instead, they were “fogged,”31 as though something had been emanating onto them.

A condition?" Her eyebrows crinkled together, and Rafe could all but see little cogs turning behind them. "Is it..." She lowered her voice. "Is it serious?" "Sadly, yes. Possibly fatal." She covered her gasp with both hands. Because, apparently, one hand wouldn't have been dramatic enough. "No. But surely something can be done. What is it?" "I don't know. I was unconscious when the doctor saw me. Lord Rafe can explain it better." Bruiser nudged him in the ribs. "Go on, then. Tell her the whole story of my malady. In detail. With all the particulars. What did that German doctor call it?" Rafe gave her a single, unembroidered word. "Syphilis." The lady's maid turned a pale shade of green. She began backing away in small steps. "I just came to say Miss Whitmore is looking for you, my lord." With that, she dropped a frantic curtsy and fled. The moment she was out of sight, Bruiser tweaked his ear. "You bloody jackass." "What are you complaining about? I lied. She believed me.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. 'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence. 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius –‘Merde pour la poésie’; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide –But one doesn’t have the right.

There is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this verse. It is the evolutionary and natural view. Of what use is it to perpetuate the misery of tuberculosis, and such diseases, as we now do? Nature's way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the Lions! Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the King must die. The King is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment. We must therefore go back to Spartan ideas of education; and the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations. The Christians to the Lions! Let weak and wry productions go back into the melting-pot, as is done with flawed steel castings. Death will purge, reincarnation make whole, these errors and abortions. Nature herself may be trusted to do this, if only we will leave her alone. But what of those who, physically fitted to live, are tainted with rottenness of soul, cancerous with the sin-complex? For the third time I answer: The Christians to the Lions! Hadit calls himself the Star, the Star being the Unit of the Macrocosm; and the Snake, the Snake being the symbol of Going or Love, the Dwarf-Soul, the Spermatozoon of all Life, as one may phrase it. The Sun, etc., are the external manifestations or Vestures of this Soul, as a Man is the Garment of an actual Spermatozoon, the Tree sprung of that Seed, with power to multiply and to perpetuate that particular Nature, though without necessary consciousness of what is happening. (―New Comment on Liber AL vel Legis III:48)

Ancestors To tell the truth, we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me. Let us use our imaginations to visualize for a moment the circumstances and conditions of the life of our parents, then our grandparents, then great-grandparents, thus further and further back. Even if among them all there happened to be wealthy individuals or men of privilege, the stench and filth in which they lived, as that then was the rule, would have astonished us who use showers and toilets. What was even more certain was among them the presence of starvelings, for whom a piece of dry bread in pre-harvest time meant happiness. Our ancestors died like flies from epidemics, from starvation, from wars, though children swarmed, for every twelve of them only one or two survived. And what strange tribes, what ugly snouts behinds you and me, what bloody rites in honor of gods carved in the trunk of a linden tree! Back to those who are stalking through the undergrowth of a murky primeval forest with chipped stones for their only weapons, in order to split the skulls of their enemies. It would seem as if we had only parents and that's all, but those other pre-pre-predecessors exist, and with them their afflictions, manias, mental illnesses, syphilis, tuberculosis, and whatnot, and how do you know they do not continue on in you? And what was the probability that among the children of your great-great-grandparents the one survived who would beget your ancestor? And what the probability that this would repeat itself in the next generation? Altogether, a very slim chance that we would be born in these skins, as these, not other, individuals, in whom the genes met those of the devil knows what whores and oafs. The very fact that our species survived and even multiplied beyond measure is astonishing, for it had much against it, and the primeval forest full of animals stronger than humans may serve till now as a metaphor for man's precarious situation - let us add viruses, bacteria, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, but also his own works, atomic weapons and the pollution of nature. Our species should have disappeared a long time ago, and it is still alive, incredibly resistant. That you and I happen to be part of it should be enough to give us pause for meditation.

We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly-spawning class of human beings who should never have been born at all.1 —Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization In 2009, Hillary Clinton came to Houston, Texas, to receive the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood. Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and the award is its highest prize. In receiving the award, Hillary said of Sanger, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. I am really in awe of her. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life and the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so greatly.”2 What was Margaret Sanger’s vision? What was the cause to which she devoted her life? Sanger is known as a champion of birth control, of providing women with the means to avoid unwanted pregnancies. But the real Margaret Sanger was very different from how she’s portrayed in Planned Parenthood brochures. The real Margaret Sanger did not want women in general to limit their pregnancies. She wanted white, wealthy, educated women to have more children, and poor, uneducated, black women to have none. “Unwanted” for Sanger didn’t mean unwanted by the mother—it meant unwanted by Sanger. Sanger’s influence contributed to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in which poor blacks were deliberately injected with syphilis without their knowledge. Today the Tuskegee Project is falsely portrayed as an example of southern backwardness and American bigotry; in fact, it was a progressive scheme carried out with the very eugenic goals that Margaret Sanger herself championed. In 1926, Sanger spoke to a Women’s Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey about her solution for reducing the black birthrate. She also sponsored a Negro Project specifically designed, in her vocabulary, to get rid of “human beings who should never have been born.” In one of her letters Sanger said, “We do not want word to get out that we are trying to exterminate the Negro population.”3 The racists loved it; other KKK speaking invitations followed. Now it may seem odd that a woman with such views would be embraced by Planned Parenthood—even odder that she would be a role model for Hillary Clinton. Why would they celebrate Sanger given her racist philosophy? In

… Das verschlug mir für einen Moment die Sprache, ich hatte nicht gedacht, dass es so schlimm um sie stand. »Das tut mir leid … Kann ich irgendetwas tun?« Nat lächelte schwach. »Hast du das nicht schon? Danke. Hau dich lieber ins Bett. Du musst früh raus. Oder hast du morgen keine Schicht?« Während ich die restliche Soße in einen Behälter füllte und in den Kühlschrank stellte, nickte ich bejahend. »Stimmt, Punkt fünf muss ich dort sein, um bei den Vorbereitungen zu helfen.« Seit ich vor sechs Monaten aus Amerika zurückgekommen war, jobbte ich als Frühstückskellner im Radisson Blu Palais Hotel, direkt am Parkring. Eine feine Adresse in Wien, vollgestopft mit gut betuchten Damen, die gerne zu viel Trinkgeld gaben. Mir konnte das mehr als Recht sein. Nur das Aufstehen war die Hölle. »Du weißt, wie streng meine Chefin ist, da gibt es kein Zuspätkommen.« Bei meinen Worten prustete Nat los: »Ja klar, als ob du sie nicht schon längst um den Finger gewickelt hättest mit deinen tiefblauen Augen«, wobei er das Wort tiefblau mit den Fingern in Anführungszeichen setzte und zu quietschen versuchte, wie es eine Bekannte von uns letzten Samstag auf einer Party getan hatte. Verspielt klimperte ich mit den Wimpern und lehnte mich an die Küchenzeile. Wieder musste Nat schmunzeln, wobei er dieses Mal schluckte, bevor er weiterredete: »Hör auf mit dem Scheiß. Verdammt, wenn ich eine Braut wäre, würde ich auch auf dich stehen. Aber weißt du was?« Nun tippte er mit der leeren Gabel in meine Richtung. »Ich würde nie mit dir ins Bett gehen, weil ich Angst vor Syphilis hätte.« Theatralisch griff ich mir mit der Hand an die Brust und verzog schmerzverzerrt das Gesicht. »Das tut weh! Dabei wärst du so eine geile Schnitte, mit deinen blonden Locken und braunen Augen. Du brichst mir das Herz.« Endlich erreichte Nats Lächeln auch wieder seine Augen und ich atmete innerlich erleichtert auf, bevor ich weiter blödelte. »Du bräuchtest dir gar keine Sorgen darum zu machen, Schatz. Ich nehme doch immer ein Kondom.« »Zum Glück«, betonte er laut, »für die ganze Stadt, sonst würden drei Viertel der Frauen bereits krank im Spital liegen.« Damit brachte er auch mich zum Lachen. »Du bist ein Idiot.« Anstatt mir eine schnelle Retourkutsche zu verpassen, zwinkerte er mir zu und stopfte sich genüsslich den nächsten Happen in den Mund. »Deshalb ist es auch keine schlechte Idee, wenn du wieder losziehst, um die Frauen anderer Städte zu beglücken, damit unsere in Frieden weiterleben können. Weißt du schon, wann es soweit ist?« Eigentlich hatte ich vorgehabt, spätestens im Herbst aufzubrechen und wieder für einige Zeit in Amerika herumzustreunen. Doch so wie mich Nat jetzt anguckte, wie ein zurückgelassener Welpe, meldete sich mein schlechtes Gewissen. Daher zuckte ich mit den Schultern. »Keine Ahnung. In den nächsten Monaten vielleicht. Warum?« Er fragte nicht grundlos, etwas in seinem Blick machte mich unruhig, aber ich konnte nicht sagen was oder warum. Wir hatten die letzten Wochen schon einige Male darüber geredet. Bisher hatte er noch nie Probleme damit gehabt, dass ich manchmal für drei, vier Monate aus dem Land verschwand. Nat leckte die Gabel ab und stellte das Geschirr in die Spüle. »Nichts. Nur so.« … (Bildquelle: pinterest) ‪

We could call Christianity, in particular, a huge treasure house of the most elegant forms of consolation — there are so many pleasant, soothing, narcotizing things piled up in it, and for this purpose it takes so many of the most dangerous and most audacious chances. It shows such sophistication, such southern refinement, especially when it guesses what kind of emotional stimulant can overcome, at least for a while, the deep depression, leaden exhaustion, and black sorrow of the physiologically impaired. For, generally speaking, with all great religions, the main issue concerns the fight against a certain endemic exhaustion and heaviness. We can from the outset assume as probable that from time to time, in particular places on the earth, a feeling of physiological inhibition must necessarily become master over wide masses of people, but, because of a lack of knowledge about physiology, it does not enter people’s consciousness as something physiological, so they look for and attempt to find its “cause” and remedy only in psychology and morality (—this, in fact, is my most general formula for whatever is commonly called a “religion”). Such a feeling of inhibition can have a varied ancestry; for instance, it can be the result of cross-breeding between different races (or between classes — for classes also always express differences in origin and race: European “Weltschmerz” [pain at the state of the world] and nineteenth-century “pessimism” are essentially the consequence of an irrational, sudden mixing of the classes), or it can be caused by incorrect emigration — a race caught in a climate for which its powers of adaptation are not sufficient (the case of the Indians in India); or by the influence of the age and exhaustion of the race (Parisian pessimism from 1850 on); or by an incorrect diet (the alcoholism of the Middle Ages, the inanity of vegetarians, who, of course, have on their side the authority of Squire Christopher in Shakespeare); or by degeneration in the blood, malaria, syphilis and things like that (German depression after the Thirty Years’ War, which spread bad diseases in an epidemic through half of Germany and thus prepared the ground for German servility, German timidity).