Germs Quotes

• The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects.

  Warder Clyde Allee

  Animal, Men, Race

  "The Social Life of Animals". Book by Warder Clyde Allee, Chapter VII: Some Human Implications, 1938.

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• A bacteriologist is a man whose conversation always start with the germ of an idea.

  Evan Esar

  Science, Technology, Men

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• It is not the germs we need worry about. It is our inner terrain.

  Louis Pasteur

  Worry, Needs, Terrain

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• There is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas or propaganda. On the one hand we are dealing with a virus which can be transported and transmitted under certain conditions which favor or limit its transportation or transmission: on the other hand with ideas, religions, and doctrines, which can be described as germs, benevolent or malevolent, according to the point of view one takes up. These germs can either remain at their source and be sterile, or emerge in the spreading of infection.

  Andre Siegfried

  Views, Hands, Ideas

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• There's always a germ of truth in just about everything.

  Jim Lehrer

  Literature

  "Jim Lehrer on Billy Bob, Reports of Rain and Stenography As Journalism". Interview with Liz Cox Barrett, www.cjr.org. June 2, 2006.

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• Pasteur originally conceived the idea of germs and of destroying them. Although this started as a personal thing, it has mushroomed into DDT, killing beetles and worms, resulting in food contamination, much sickness, and trouble. Although he is regarded as hero by modern medicine, Pasteur will be treated in much the same way as a warmonger when he is judged in the spiritual world.

  Michio Kushi

  Spiritual, Hero, Ddt

  "Spiritual Journey: Michio Kushi's Guide to Endless Self-Realization and Freedom". Book by Michio Kushi and Edward Esko (p. 55), December 1994.

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• Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Happiness, Happy, Cheer

  "To My Daughters, With Love". Book by Pearl S. Buck, 1967.

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• For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue.

  Charles Kingsley

  Noble, Firsts, Shame

  'Health and Education' (1874) p. 20

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• Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.

  G. Stanley Hall

  Art, Average, Civilization

  G. Stanley Hall (2013). “Adolescence - Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Religion (1931)”, p.163, Read Books Ltd

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• Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Connections, Different, Literature

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, James L. W. West (2005). “Fitzgerald: My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940”, p.147, Cambridge University Press

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• Yes, now I understood for the first time that my soul was not so poor and empty as it had seemed to me, and that it had been only the sun that was lacking to open all its germs, and buds to the light.

  Max Muller

  Light, Soul, Bud

  Max Muller (1912). “Memories”

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• On man when he came into life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life.

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

  Father, Men, Way

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1953). “Oratio de Hominis Dignitate: Oration on the Dignity of Man. English Translation by Elizabet Livermore Forbes”

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• If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men.

  George Wald

  Ocean, Science, Men

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• Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

  Oscar Wilde

  Determination, Ambition, Growth

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• Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Ambition, Government, Design

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.43, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession of Siamese Twins, the whole evolved by natural and orderly processes from one microscopic parent germ.

  Mark Twain

  Life, Science, Parent

  Mark Twain (2003). “Tales of Wonder”, p.223, U of Nebraska Press

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• The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the germs of its production.

  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

  Meditation, Mind, Experience

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• The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man.

  Albert Einstein

  Art, Lying, Men

  "Mein Weltbild (My World-view)". Essay by Albert Einstein, 1931.

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• At the bottom of every leaf-stem is a cradle, and in it is an infant germ; the winds will rock it, the birds will sing to it all summer long, but the next season it will unfold and go alone.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Summer, Song, Rocks

  Henry Ward Beecher, William Drysdale (1887). “Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit”

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• Fighting the Taliban and the various radical organizations on the front lines is like adding a Band-Aid to a cut, it may stop the bleeding but unless you clean it with antiseptic, the germs stay and multiply.

  Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

  Fighting, Cutting, Organization

  "Children taught to be suicide bombers" by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, www.cnn.com. June 15, 2010.

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• To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

  Bertrand Russell

  Funny, Happiness, Laughter

  "The Conquest of Happiness" by Bertrand Russell, (Ch. 13), 1930.

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• Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.

  Herman Melville

  Ignorant, Principles, Spirit

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• When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived

  Arthur Koestler

  Country, Feet, Atmosphere

  Arthur Koestler (1973). “The lion and the ostrich: the eighth annual lecture under the "Thank-offering to Britain Fund."”, Not Avail

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• Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years... has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates, and Darwin himself, were actively concerned with geographical exploration, and it was largely facts of geographical distribution in a spatial setting which provided Darwin with the germ of his theory.

  David Stoddart

  Taken, Inspiration, Science

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• Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Science, Men

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