Physicians from New York City

"Edward R. Murrow: Who owns the patent on this vaccine? Jonas Salk: Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

"It is courage based on confidence, not daring, and it is confidence based on experience."

"I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more."

"Why did Mozart compose music?"

"Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience … it's just chance that I happened to be here at this particular time when there was available and at my disposal the great experience of all the investigators who plodded along for a number of years."

"Neither wisdom nor good will is now dominant. Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."

"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

"I have dreams, and I have nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams."

"I couldn't possibly have become a member of this institute if I hadn't founded it myself."

"I have the impression that the new generation of young people, are coming up on the scene with a sense "ancestorhood", and with more wisdom than was evident before. I think this comes about as a matter of necessity — Almost as if there is something in us that is innate, something inherent in us, that is destined for a longer term, rather than a shorter term future."

"What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other."

"When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better — ever so much slightly better — at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it."

"As a bio-philosopher — as someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and in a sense, we have become the process itself — through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and to anticipate the future and to choose from amongst alternatives."

"Richard Heffner: You say "We can create ourselves and our future" Salk: — by shaping our selves not our cells — thats the important distinction. … We are shaping our cells, but we will not change our selves in the course of shaping our cells."

"I look upon ourselves as partners in all of this, and that each of us contributes and does what he can do best. And so I see not a top rung and a bottom rung — I see all this horizontally — and I see this as part of a matrix. And I see every human being as having a purpose, a destiny, if you like. And what my hope is that we can find some way to fulfill the biological potential, if you like — the destiny that exists in each of us — and find ways and means to provide such opportunities for everyone. Now at the moment the world is suffering from large numbers of people who have no purpose in life — for whom there is no opportunity — and that's sad."

"There is something about human nature that has to be understood, and so … I've shifted my attention from an interest in unity to an interest in creativity."

"I already see enough evidence for this optimism … in recent years I find that perhaps what Im seeking is a scientific basis for hope, and I think I've found it."

"As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that. That's what motivates me."

"I was told I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry but my preference was to stay with medicine. And I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis. Just as I intended to study law, to make just laws, so I found myself interested now in the laws of nature, as distinct from the laws the people make."

"Some people are constructive, if you like. Others are destructive. It's this diversity in humankind that results in some making positive contributions and some negative contributions. It's necessary to have enough who make positive contributions to overcome the problems of each age."

"We were told in one lecture that it was possible to immunize against diphtheria and tetanus by the use of chemically treated toxins, or toxoids. And the following lecture, we were told that for immunization against a virus disease, you have to experience the infection, and that you could not induce immunity with the so-called "killed" or inactivated, chemically treated virus preparation. Well, somehow, that struck me. What struck me was that both statements couldn't be true. And I asked why this was so, and the answer that was given was in a sense, 'Because.' There was no satisfactory answer."

"Why do I see things differently from the way other people see them? Why do I pursue the questions that I pursue, even if others regard them as, as they say, "controversial?" Which merely means that they have a difference of opinion. They see things differently. I am interested both in nature, and in the human side of nature, and how the two can be brought together, and effectively used."

"Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do."

"My attitude was always to keep open, to keep scanning. I think that's how things work in nature. Many people are close-minded, rigid, and that's not my inclination."

"There are three stages of truth. First is that it can't be true, and that's what they said. You couldn't immunize against polio with a killed-virus vaccine. Second phase: they say, "Well, if it's true, it's not very important. And the third stage is, 'Well, we've known it all along.""

"You have to develop a thick skin in life. Its not in this field only. You might think of the ideal of the scientists, the ivory tower, the idealist. That's true of some. And I wouldn't guess as to what proportion. But there are some who are of that character, and there are some who are not."

"Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don't recognize the pattern and the significance. It's the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It's a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it's positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It's like a journey. It's like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else."

"You can have a team of unconventional thinkers, as well as conventional thinkers. If you don't have the support of others you cannot achieve anything altogether on your own. It's like a cry in the wilderness. In each instance there were others who could see the same thing, and there were others who could not. It's an obvious difference we see in those who you might say have a bird's eye view, and those who have a worm's eye view. I've come to realize that we all have a different mind set, we all see things differently, and that's what the human condition is really all about."

"Since whatever we do has to be part of a team, part of a community, we have to attempt to bring together those who have the same conviction, see the same things. Then it becomes a matter of time, when one or the other will prevail. Fortunately, there is all this diversity, and if not for that, problems would not be solved."

"The evolvers are people who cause things to change. The maintainers of the status quo do everything to keep things from changing. And, there I see differences of perception. Differences in vision. Differences in interpretation, and differences in temperament, in personality. The number of evolvers are much fewer than the maintainers of the status quo. And amongst the evolvers, there are some who are initiators, some who go along with what other people recognize to be new or different."

"I have come to associate a kind of success that we are referring to, to individuals who have a combination of attributes that are often associated with creativity. In a way they are mutants, they are different from others. And they follow their own drummer. We know what that means. And are we all like that? We are not like that. If you are, then it would be well to recognize that there were others before you. And, people like that are not very happy or content, until they are allowed to express, or they can express what's in them to express. It's that driving force that I think is like the process of evolution working on us, and in us, and with us, and through us. That's how we continue on, and will improve our lot in life, solve the problems that arise. Partly out of necessity, partly out of this drive to improve."

"Reason alone will not serve. Intuition alone can be improved by reason, but reason alone without intuition can easily lead the wrong way. They both are necessary. The way I like to put it is that when I have an intuition about something, I send it over to the reason department. Then after I've checked it out in the reason department, I send it back to the intuition department to make sure that it's still all right. That's how my mind works, and that's how I work. That's why I think that there is both an art and a science to what we do. The art of science is as important as so-called technical science. You need both. It's this combination that must be recognized and acknowledged and valued."

"I am interested in a phase that I think we are entering. I call it "teleological evolution," evolution with a purpose. The idea of evolution by design, designing the future, anticipating the future. I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?"

"What you see in living systems, and in genetic systems, is that the genes are already there, having arisen in the course of time, and when they are needed they become activated. If they had to be invented, the time would be too late. By the same token, I think that the people who are needed to help guide the future already exist. They simply need to recognize this in themselves, react to the opportunities that prevail, and also be valued and be encouraged. It's that very large, and as yet amorphous, rung that is of interest to me. I hope to articulate this, and see to what extent it makes sense to others as well."

"The first thing I would like to point out is that each of us have a different purpose that we have to serve in the evolutionary scheme of things. We are not all equally endowed to do everything. When I speak about teleological evolution, I speak about the idea of "telos," purpose."

"Know what is the purpose of life that you are inclined to serve, that you are drawn to. Do what makes your heart leap rather than simply follow some style or fashion. Not everyone can or should be a scientist. Not everyone can or should be any one thing. People need to know what kind of purpose they can serve."

"The idea of being constructive, creative, positive, in trying to bring out the best in one's own self and the best in others follows from what I've just been saying. Again, I repeat my belief in us, in ourselves, as the product of the process of evolution, and part of the process itself. I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience. It's the need to dedicate one's self in that way, to one's own self, and to choose an activity or life that is of value not only to yourself but to others as well."

"My life is pretty well at peace, and the profession is more of an avocation. It's a calling, if you like, rather than a job. I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that's one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in a positive, creative, constructive way, revealing the truth and beauty that exists in life and in nature."

"I see weeds and flowers. I think of it in those terms, and we have to discriminate and distinguish between the two, to recognize and encourage those human qualities and attributes that are the more positive."

"I judge things from an evolutionary perspective — "How does this serve and contribute to the process of our own evolution?" — rather than think of good and evil in moral terms. I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution."

"I speak about universal evolution and teleological evolution, because I think the process of evolution reflects the wisdom of nature. I see the need for wisdom to become operative. We need to try to put all of these things together in what I call an evolutionary philosophy of our time."

"The work of Dr. Salk is in the highest tradition of selfless and dedicated medical research. He has provided a means for the control of a dread disease. By helping scientists in other countries with technical information; by offering to them the strains of seed virus and professional aid so that the production of vaccine can be started by them everywhere; by welcoming them to his laboratory that they may gain a fuller knowledge, Dr. Salk is a benefactor of mankind. His achievement, a credit to our entire scientific community, does honor to all the people of the United States."

"Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you. You have lost your anonymity."

"He felt that he couldn't ask other parents to let him give this vaccine to their children if he wasn't willing to first try it on his own."

"It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage in my life."

"I must mend the ways of my mind. This is a very big place, and I do not know how it works. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that."

"The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internist’s wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning. Obviously, it is a great time-saver and money-saver for the physician’s family that anxiety about disease is not handled as though it were the disease itself; there is perhaps greater willingness to accept anxiety as a natural, often transient, phenomenon. And certainly there is much less ambition to deploy the full technology of medicine as a corrective for the human condition."

"It is conceivable that we might be able to provide good medical care for everyone needing it, in a new system designed to assure equity, provided we can restrain ourselves, or our computers, from designing a system in which all 200 million of us are assumed to be in constant peril of failed health every day of our lives. In the same sense that our judicial system presumes us to be innocent until proven guilty, a medical care system may work best if it starts with the presumption that most people are healthy. Left to themselves, computers may try to do it in the opposite way, taking it as given that some sort of direct, continual, professional intervention is required all the time, in order to maintain the health of each citizen, and we will end up spending all our money on nothing but this."

"The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology."

"It is when physicians are bogged down by their incomplete technologies, by the innumerable things they are obliged to do in medicine when they lack a clear understanding of disease mechanisms, that the deficiencies of the health-care system are most conspicuous. If I were a policy-maker, interested in saving money for health care over the long haul, I would regard it as an act of high prudence to give high priority to a lot more basic research in biologic science."

"Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later."

"It is nice to think that there are so many unsolved puzzles ahead for biology, although I wonder whether we will ever find enough graduate students."

"We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time."

"Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism."

"If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do."

"I can think of a few microorganisms, possibly the tubercle bacillus, the syphilis spirochete, the malarial parasite, and a few others, that have a selective advantage in their ability to infect human beings, but there is nothing to be gained, in an evolutionary sense, by the capacity to cause illness or death. Pathogenicity may be something of a disadvantage for most microbes, carrying lethal risks far more frightening to them than to us. The man who catches a meningococcus is in considerably less danger for his life, even without chemotherapy, than meningococci with the bad luck to catch a man."

"Cells are required to stick precisely to the point. Any ambiguity, any tendency to wander from the matter at hand, will introduce grave hazards for the cells, and even more for the host in which they live. Minor inaccuracies may cause reactions in which neighboring cells are recognized as foreign, and done in. There is a theory that the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information. It is not a system that allows for deviating."

"The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past."

"Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places."

"Science gets most of its information by the process of reductionism, exploring the details, then the details of the details, until all the smallest bits of the structure, or the smallest parts of the mechanism, are laid out for counting and scrutiny. Only when this is done can the investigation be extended to encompass the whole organism or the entire system. So we say. Sometimes it seems that we take a loss, working this way."

"We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are stamped with stereotyped, unalterable patterns of response, ready to be released. And the behavior released in us, by such confrontations, is, essentially, a surprised affection. It is compulsory behavior and we can avoid it only by straining with the full power of our conscious minds, making up conscious excuses all the way. Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends."

"Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls. When they are massed together, all touching, exchanging bits of information held in their jaws like memoranda, they become a single animal. Look out for that. It is a debasement, a loss of individuality, a violation of human nature, an unnatural act. Sometimes people argue this point of view seriously and with deep thought. Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make convincingly when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print out leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to all of them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can’t do this and keep a straight face."

"Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our kind of civilization as affection or friendship or attachment. I can’t see why it should be unreasonable for all human beings to have strands of DNA coiled up in chromosomes, coding out instincts for usefulness and helpfulness. Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness."

"Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms."

"Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else."

"As a people we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body."

"The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers."

"I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they’d be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today’s identical twins."

"I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember."

"It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in the males of our species than in the females."

"I might be better able to help parents of dying children, but for quite a while I felt less able, too emotionally involved. And from that time on, I could rarely discuss the death of a child without tears welling up into my eyes."

"Each day of those early years in pediatric surgery I felt I was on the cutting edge. Some of the surgical problems that landed on the operating table at Children's had not even been named. Many of the operations I performed had never been done before. It was an exuberant feeling, but also a little scary. At times I was troubled by fears that I wasn't doing things the right way, that I would have regrets, or that someone else had performed a certain procedure successfully but had never bothered to write it up for the medical journals, or if they had I couldn't find it."

"There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today’s pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent."

"In science, modesty and genius do not coexist well together. (In Washington, modesty and cleverness don’t.) Einstein is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule."

"Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637."

"Communism always had sympathetic Westerners who amounted to a fifth column, including communist parties and intellectuals. Its appeal made it a double threat, internal and external. In the old days, communist parties were on the verge of getting parliamentary majorities in some European countries. That threat doesn't exist with Islam. The fundamentalists have nothing like that demographic or political import, even in Europe. The Muslim population in America is not much fundamentalist, nor radicalized. Rather, it accepts American religious pluralism and lives, like other religions, in a quite harmonious and pluralistic way. Of all the ideologies remaining in the world in the debris of the collapsed Soviet empire, fundamentalist Islam is the only one that, at least in our lifetime, appears to pose a serious problem to the West. It's the only expressly anti-Western ideology of any importance in the world and it means to destroy the Western position, Western institutions, Western culture, wherever it can. This occurred in Iran, and will happen again in Algeria. Should fundamentalists take power in Egypt, there will be profound geopolitical consequences. A region very important to us will be destabilized, with many problems resulting. Once that happens, we'll be asking ourselves why we weren't worrying about this years ago."

"There's something in the Western psyche, especially the Western liberal, pluralistic psyche, that finds it impossible to believe that radical ideologues mean what they say. We didn't believe communists or fascists, and in the early days we found it impossible to believe the Khomeinists. Yet these are people who do believe what they say. Attempts to moderate their behavior invariably fail; these are exercises in our heads. We need a policy of strong opposition to the fundamentalists and of strong support for those Muslims who stand up to them."

"Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country — and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians."

"In the Middle Ages people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today’s shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead."

"Late in the game, Blue's king was under savage attack by Kasparov. Any human player under such assault by a world champion would be staring at his own king trying to figure out how to get away. Instead, Blue ignored the threat and quite nonchalantly went hunting for lowly pawns at the other end of the board. In fact, at the point of maximum peril, Blue expended two moves--many have died giving Kasparov even one--to snap one pawn. It was as if, at Gettysburg, General Meade had sent his soldiers out for a bit of apple picking moments before Pickett's charge because he had calculated that they could get back to their positions with a half-second to spare."

"Israel is different. In Israel the great temptation of modernity — assimilation — simply does not exist. Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity. It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store."

"Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete."

"I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart."

"Obsession with self is the motif of our time."

"Reading conventional notions of class struggle and anti-colonialism into bin Laden, the Taliban, and radical Islam is not just solipsistic. It is nonsense. If poverty and destitution, colonialism and capitalism are animating radical Islam, explain this: In March, the Taliban went to the Afghan desert where stood great monuments of human culture, two massive Buddhas carved out of a cliff. At first, Taliban soldiers tried artillery. The 1,500-year-old masterpieces proved too hardy. The Taliban had to resort to dynamite. They blew the statues to bits, then slaughtered 100 cows in atonement-for having taken so long to finish the job. Buddhism is hardly a representative of the West. It is hardly a cause of poverty and destitution. It is hardly a symbol of colonialism. No. The statues represented two things: an alternative faith and a great work of civilization. To the Taliban, the presence of both was intolerable."

"[R]adical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts represented civilization embodied in stone or steel. They had to be destroyed. This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel-mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."

"Once again, the world is faced with a transcendent conflict between those who love life and those who love death both for themselves and their enemies. Which is why we tremble. Upon witnessing the first atomic bomb explode at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited a verse from the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." We tremble because for the first time in history, nihilism will soon be armed with the ultimate weapons of annihilation. For the first time in history, the nihilist will have the means to match his ends. Which is why the war declared upon us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our lives, but in the life of civilization itself."

"When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back."

"The way I see it, dogs had this big meeting, oh, maybe 20,000 years ago. A huge meeting — an international convention with delegates from everywhere. And that's when they decided that humans were the up-and-coming species and dogs were going to throw their lot in with them. The decision was obviously not unanimous. The wolves and dingoes walked out in protest."

"'Optimism' is the perfect way to trivialize everything that Reagan was or did. […] Optimism? Every other person on the No. 6 bus is an optimist. What distinguished Reagan was what he did and said. Reagan was optimistic about America amid the cynicism and general retreat of the post-Vietnam era because he believed unfashionably that America was both great and good."

"My proposition is this: A vast number of Americans who oppose legalization and fear new waves of immigration would change their minds if we could radically reduce new — i.e., future — illegal immigration. Forget employer sanctions. Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won't do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put in cameras. Put in sensors. Put out lots of patrols."

"In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice."

"In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit."

"I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats."

"The new Detroit churning out Schumer-mobiles will make the steel mills of the Soviet Union look the model of efficiency."

"Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history."

"If you’re very very rich, you can buy your Senate seat by spending as much of your money as you want. Meanwhile, your poor plebian opponent is running around groveling for the small contributions allowed by law. Hence the Corzines and the Kohls, who parachute into Congress seemingly out of nowhere. Having given this leg up to the rich, we should resist packing our legislatures with yet more privileged parachutists, the well-born. True, the Brits did it that way for centuries, but with characteristic honesty. They established a house of Parliament exclusively for high-born twits and ensconced them there for life. There they chatter away in supreme irrelevance deep into their dotage. Problem is that the U.S. Senate retains House of Commons powers even as it develops a House of Lords membership."

"Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. […] For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians."

"In these most recent 20 years -- the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world -- America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved -- and resulted in -- the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. The two Balkan interventions -- as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims (43 Americans were killed) -- were humanitarian exercises of the highest order, there being no significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. In these 20 years, this nation has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim, anywhere on Earth. Why are we apologizing?"

"With our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy."

"Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible."

"Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism."

"If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: "fair," leveled and social democratic. Obama didn't get elected to warranty your muffler. He's here to warranty your life."

"Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy."

"Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women's rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country — balanced, of course, with this: "Issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." Example? "The struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life." Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women's softball team has received insufficient Title IX funds — while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays as well — but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who's to judge?"

"Look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated. How could we?"

"Except for the demented orphan, the living will is quite beside the point. The one time it really is essential is if you think your fractious family will be only too happy to hasten your demise to get your money. That’s what the law is good at — protecting you from murder and theft. But that is a far cry from assuring a peaceful and willed death, which is what most people imagine living wills are about."

"Affluent enviros are all for wind farms, until one is proposed that might mar the serenity of a sail from the crew-necked precincts near Nantucket Sound. Then it's clean energy for thee, not for me."

"The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline — or continued ascendancy — is in our hands."

"The UN is worse than disaster. The UN creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful UN Human Rights Council. It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty, and anti-Semitic among other things. The world would be better off in its absence."

"In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average. His approval ratings are roughly equal to what the last five presidents' were at the same time in their first term. […] He will not be the great transformer he imagines himself to be. A president like others -- with successes and failures."

"What made Obama unique was that he was the ultimate charismatic politician -- the most unknown stranger ever to achieve the presidency in the United States. No one knew who he was, he came out of nowhere, he had this incredible persona that floated him above the fray, destroyed Hillary, took over the Democratic Party and became president. This is truly unprecedented: A young unknown with no history, no paper trail, no well-known associates, self-created."

"Longevity for a columnist is a simple proposition: once you start, you don't stop. You do it until you die, or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax."

"From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. […] Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management. And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." […] Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare.""

"Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference between Kennedy's liberalism and Obama's. Kennedy's was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons, Obama's is a constricted inward-looking call to retreat. Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it."

"Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off."

"To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something -- to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity."

"It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good."

"For liberals, the observation that 'the peasants are revolting' is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail."

"The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment."

"Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You "take in" a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying."

"As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence."

"For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction."

"We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics – in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations – is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history."

"An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking — and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live."

"This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily […] to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds. You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed."

"The greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive. Absurd. We don't credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik."

"I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer."

"I believe in what I believe, and I think after all these years I've heard a lot of arguments, and I'm convinced by the superiority of the arguments that are made on the conservative side. I think that's a better way to run a society."

"We live in an entertainment culture soaked in graphic, often sadistic, violence. Older folks find themselves stunned by what a desensitized youth finds routine, often amusing. It’s not just movies. Young men sit for hours pulling video-game triggers, mowing down human beings en masse without pain or consequence. And we profess shock when a small cadre of unstable, deeply deranged, dangerously isolated young men go out and enact the overlearned narrative."

"It’s the jihadists who decided to make the world a battlefield and to wage war in perpetuity. Until they abandon the field, what choice do we have but to carry the fight to them?"

"I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise. For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science."

"It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell, ‘Stop.’ You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff."

"The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism."

"If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today are whatever the majority decides they are that morning. What distinguishes an institution from a flash mob is that its rules endure. They can be changed, of course. But only by significant supermajorities. That’s why constitutional changes require two-thirds of both houses plus three-quarters of the states. If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution. As of today, the Senate effectively has no rules. Congratulations, Harry Reid. Finally, something you will be remembered for."

"Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything — high and low and, most especially, high — lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. […] Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns."

"The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help."

"To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."

"We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. Organized terror has shown what it can do; execute the single greatest massacre in American history, shut down the greatest power on the globe and send its leaders into underground shelters. All this, without even resorting to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction. This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of cowards perpetrating senseless acts of violence is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly, vicious warriors and need to be treated as such. Nor are their acts of violence senseless. They have a very specific aim: to avenge alleged historical wrongs and to bring the great American satan to its knees."

"Remember how Democrats were complaining that Republicans were trying to overturn Obamacare, it was somehow unpatriotic, because it was an attack on the law of the land. This law of the land doesn’t even exist. It exists in Obama’s head. It’s whatever he thinks. He wakes up in the morning and decides what the law is gonna be."

"The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation — no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences — from social ostracism to vocational defenestration — upon those who refuse to be silenced."

"I never had a Marxist phase. If I did it lasted a weekend, and it must have been a hell of a weekend because I don’t remember it..."

"There’s a reason why the French are on their fifth republic, and we are on our first, and that’s because we did not have a worship of reason at the beginning of the Founding as the French did, and then discovered that the purity, the Rousseauian idea is simply not one for the real world, or not one that avoids the guillotine..."

"[P]eople misunderstand Israel, and see it now in colonial, imperialist terms is because it’s a unique event in human history. The British colonization of North America, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch in South Africa, they came to places that they had never been to. That’s colonialism. You put your people in there. You takeover. You marginalize the natives if you can. You may not succeed. In South Africa, that’s colonialism. So they see the Jews arriving in what’s called Palestine, and that’s the parallel, the only one they understand. They can’t put their heads around the fact that this is a people returning to their home. That they never gave up title to. They never gave up their longing for. It was repeated in their rituals three times a day, it wasn’t like once a year, let’s remember the homeland."

"Donald Trump, the man who defied every political rule and prevailed to win his party’s nomination, last week took on perhaps the most sacred political rule of all: Never attack a Gold Star family. Not just because it alienates a vital constituency but because it reveals a shocking absence of elementary decency and of natural empathy for the most profound of human sorrows — parental grief. Why did Trump do it? It wasn’t a mistake. It was a revelation. It’s that he can’t help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion — whether or not it/he is “nice” to Trump."

"Of course we all try to protect our own dignity and command respect. But Trump’s hypersensitivity and unedited, untempered Pavlovian responses are, shall we say, unusual in both ferocity and predictability. This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him."

"A gaffe in Washington is when a politician inadvertently reveals the truth, especially about himself."

"In 1980, Reagan had to do just one thing: pass the threshold test for acceptability. He won that election because he did, especially in the debate with Jimmy Carter in which Reagan showed himself to be genial, self-assured and, above all, nonthreatening. You may not like all his policies, but you could safely entrust the nation to him. Trump badly needs to pass that threshold. If character is destiny, he won’t."

"I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny. I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life — full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended."

"@krauthammer: On sale today. Things That Matter in paperback. With a new section on the Obama years."

"Over the more than twenty years that I knew him, Charles thought about death every day. He told me that once. If that sounds morose, it was just the opposite. Because he was one of those rare people with the courage to look reality squarely in the face, Charles radiated a calm cheerfulness. He knew what was coming. He'd been very close to it before. He didn't want to leave, but it didn't scare him. […] 'I lived the life that I intended,' he wrote, and there is no higher achievement than that."

"He was literally in a class by himself. He was […] one of a kind. And […] for all of the sharpness of his thought and writing […] he was extraordinarily kind and gentle. And the combination made you love him. And we did. All of us did. The audience did. You couldn't help it. […] He was a giant of our time, and of our trade. […] He wrote beautifully ; he was careful about his facts ; he thought things through ; and he conducted himself with extraordinary dignity and grace. […] You couldn't dislike him. You couldn't help but admire him. […] Even if you disagreed with him, you recognized the power of his thought, the thoroughness of his research, and the quality of his writing. And […] if you knew him personally, there was that wonderful quality that he had – that kindness, that gentleness, that grace – and […] if you knew what he’d been through, and you could see what he’d overcome, and you saw the way he’d handled all that, […] you admired him as you probably didn’t admire anyone else. I can’t think of anyone on earth that I admired more than Charles Krauthammer, and I admire him to this day."

"Charles was a conservative intellectual, and he looked at things the way they were. He wasn't a knee-jerk anything. [...] I think that his passing is such a loss for conservatism - it's such a loss for public discourse, which, as Mort {Kondracke] just said, is getting more toxic and tribal and ugly by the day - Charles was the antidote to all of that. [...] He also had an incredibly sweet, sunny disposition. I don't think I ever saw Charles dark or angry at anything. And I think that's why he was able to [...] persevere through all of the incredible obstacles that life handed out to him, which he did not dwell on for a second."

"He was one of the most intelligent and honest men I have ever known. […] Charles led a life of change, breaking away and rebuilding with every new generation. He succeeded out of sheer will and a type of quiet passion. His was a life of growth and discovery. And, for the many of us who knew him or followed his writings, there was a genuine genius to his 68-year journey."

"I worked for him as a research assistant out of college. I was scared the entire time. Not because he did anything to make me feel uncomfortable – he'd be incapable of that – but […] he had a formidable dignity to him, and you always knew you were in the presence […] of a superior intellect. I think he ranks with Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol – as among the top conservative intellectuals of the last fifty years. He was one of the great defenders of our civilization and he represented what was best about it, and his voice will be missed and never replaced."

"There is within each of us a "life-instinct," which is forever working toward health, happiness, and all that makes for more life for the individual."

"A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment."

"I have been studying inherited susceptibility of cancer through affected families. The goal is to identify genes that are involved in cancer development."

"I was attracted to studies of cancer families because epidemiological studies show that virtually all cancers manifest a tendency to aggregate in families. Close relatives of a cancer patient are at increased risk of that neoplasm, and perhaps other forms of cancer. The excess site-specific cancer risk is exceptionally high for carriers of certain cancer genes, in whom the attack rate can approach 100 percent. In candidate cancer families, the possibility that clustering is on the basis of chance must be excluded through epidemiological studies that establish the presence of an excess cancer risk. Predisposed families are candidates for laboratory studies to identify the inherited susceptibility factors. These investigations have led to the identification and isolation of human cancer genes, the tumor suppressor genes. These cancer genes are among more than 200 single-gene traits associated with the development of cancer. Approximately a dozen inherited susceptibility genes have been definitively identified, and many more are being sought. From studies of retinoblastoma and other rare cancers, important new information was generated about the fundamental biology of cancers that arise in many patients. Isolation of an inherited cancer susceptibility gene provides opportunities for presymptomatic testing of at-risk relatives. However, testing of healthy individuals also raise important issues regarding informed consent, confidentiality and potential for adverse psychological, social and economic effects."

"Most retired business people "know how to work but they don't know how to play; they are completely devoid of the spirit of relaxation and recreation. Such forced idleness is ruinous to the morale of many of the more capable men of affairs.""

"The differentiation of the neuroses from organic visceral diseases, Dr. Crohn said, "is one of the difficult problems in clinical medicine. Let him who is proud of his acumen and experience as a physician survey, from year to year, his own record in this respect, and his pride may take, will take, a severe fall. With his eyes wide open to the problem, with much experience with the world, people and moods, and with years of clinical training and knowledge, no one is immune to, at times, mistaking organic diseases for the neuroses, or of falsely interpreting neurotic symptoms in terms of pathological states."

"The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world. It leads me to seek happiness in the lap of, and love of my family, in the society of my neighbors, and my books, in the wholesome occupations of my farm and my affairs, in an interest or affection in every kind of bud that opens, in every breath that blows around me, in an entire freedom of rest or motion, owing account to myself alone of my hours and actions."

"As a physician I am embarrassed by the lack of initiative and obstructionist policies of my own medical profession toward healthier lifestyles. This is not surprising. Physicians lack training and knowledge of nutrition and are self-serving when they proclaim “patients won't follow plant-based nutrition.” Having counseled patients with severe coronary artery heart disease for over twenty years, I find the opposite to be true. Patients sent home to die by expert cardiologists after failing bypass or stents rejoice as they lose weight, eliminate angina chest pains, lessen their medication, lower their blood sugars, decrease or come off their insulin, revert their positive stress test back to normal, selectively diminish the plaque plugging their arteries, and resume a fully active life empowered by the knowledge that they, not their physicians, have become the locus of control for the disease that was destroying them."

"I believe that we in the medical profession have taken the wrong course. It is as if we were simply standing by, watching millions of people march over a cliff, and then intervening in a desperate, last-minute attempt to save them once they have fallen over the edge. Instead, we should be teaching them how to avoid the chasm entirely, how to walk parallel to the precipice so that they will never fall at all. I believe that coronary artery disease is preventable, and that even after it is under way, its progress can be stopped, its insidious effects reversed. I believe, and my work over the past twenty years has demonstrated, that all this can be accomplished without expensive mechanical intervention and with minimal use of drugs. The key lies in nutrition—specifically, in abandoning the toxic American diet and maintaining cholesterol levels well below those historically recommended by health policy experts."

"[Responding to the argument that a plant-based diet is extreme] Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that “extreme”."

"There has to be a seismic revolution in medicine. Many of us are concerned that the medical schools are run by the pharmaceutical industry. You get all this marvelous training for illness. You become brilliant about diagnosing, and once something's diagnosed, you decide what drugs or procedures are required. Nobody asks, ‘Why do you have this hypertension?’ You don't suddenly wake up when you're 30 with hypertension. For the last thirty years, every time you consumed certain foods, your body took a hit. And it catches up to you."

"In all of western civilization, there is nothing more common than coronary artery heart disease, and that is because of the foods that most people eat every day."

"The modern food and drug industry has converted a significant portion of the world's people to a new religion—a massive cult of pleasure seekers who consume coffee, cigarettes, soft drinks, candy, chocolate, alcohol, processed foods, fast foods, and concentrated dairy fat (cheese) in a self-indulgent orgy of destructive behavior. When the inevitable results of such bad habits appear—pain, suffering, sickness, and disease—the addicted cult members drag themselves to physicians and demand drugs to alleviate their pain, mask their symptoms, and cure their diseases. These revelers become so drunk on their addictive behavior and the accompanying addictive thinking that they can no longer tell the difference between health and health care."

"The modern diet is not slightly deficient in just a handful of micronutrients; it is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived, immunity-building compounds. These are not optional; you can't have a lifetime of good health without them."

"You can not buy health, you must earn it through healthy living."

"There is an issue of vital importance that most well-meaning parents are not aware of: the modern diet that most children are eating today creates a fertile cellular environment for cancer to emerge at a later age. Trying to prevent breast, prostate, and other cancers as an adult may not be totally possible because most risk factors cannot be changed at this late stage. The bottom line is that in order to have a major impact on preventing cancer we must intervene much earlier, even as early as the first ten years of life. In other words, childhood diets create adult cancers."

"The most recent scientific evidence is both overwhelming and shocking—what we feed (or don't feed) our children as they grow from birth to early adulthood has a greater total contributory effect on the dietary contribution to cancers than dietary intake over the next fifty years."

"Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, and self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body’s powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years. The chronic diseases commonly associated with aging—hypertension, coronary artery disease, Type II diabetes, degenerative joint disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s, as well as most cancers—are not the inevitable outcome of the aging process; they are born out of wrong food choices earlier in life. Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Medical intervention does very little to slow the progression of illnesses and gradual mental and physical decline. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth."

"Populations with diets with little or no saturated fat have little or no heart disease. The development of heart disease begins in childhood. Not only do unhealthy childhood diets high in saturated fat and low in the protective micronutrients found in unprocessed plant foods accelerate heart disease, but they promote the aging process, and create a cellular environment favorable for the development of cancer. To add insult to injury, much of the processed foods children eat are rich in trans fat, a man-made fat that is also linked to cancer and heart disease. We could not have designed a cancer-causing environment more effectively if we scientifically planned it. We feed our children a diet high in saturated fat, add lots of processed foods with those dangerous (man-made) trans fats, and combine it with an insufficient intake of unrefined plant foods to guarantee sufficient phytochemical deprivation, and presto, we have created a nation rich in autoimmune illnesses, allergies, obesity, diabetes, and finally, heart disease and cancer."

"There is considerable evidence that the lipoprotein abnormalities (high LDL and low HDL) that are linked to heart attack deaths in adulthood begin to develop in early childhood and that higher cholesterol levels eventually get “set” by early food habits. What we eat during our childhood affects our lifetime cholesterol levels. For many, changing the diet to a plant-based, low-saturated-fat diet in later life does not result in the favorable cholesterol levels that would have been seen if the dietary improvements were started much earlier in life."

"Whether you eat a vegetarian diet or you include a very small amount of animal foods, for optimal health you must get the majority of calories from unrefined plant food with a minimal amount of animal products. A large quantity of unrefined plant food grants the greatest protection against developing serious disease."

"A diet optimally designed for adult humans would naturally be ideal for the children of that species, too. There are no special needs children have that would make them require a different diet. Even at the time of rapid growth and brain development, the optimal supply of energy and essential fats can be met by an appropriately planned vegetarian or vegan diet."

"As you begin to eat healthful, nutrient-dense foods, such as vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds, you flood your body with the vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that it so desperately needs. You will not only see immediate weight-loss benefits, your food preferences will also undergo a metamorphosis as you begin to crave health-supporting food instead of disease-causing food. The foods that once meant so much to you lose their appeal. And your bad emotionally based eating habits will start to disappear along with your waistline."

"When the ratio of nutrients to calories is high, fat melts away, and health is restored. The more nutrient-dense food you consume, the more you'll be satisfied with fewer calories, and the less you'll crave fat and high-calorie foods."

"A high-nutrient diet will reduce your desire for high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. Within weeks, your taste buds will change, and you'll lose interest in the unhealthy foods you once thought you could never live without. You'll feel more satisfied eating fewer calories than you were eating before. The result is lasting health and permanent weight loss."

"If there is one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are fifteen operations, you know that none of them work."

"Tradition is a persuasive teacher, even when what it teaches is erroneous."

"Long after the theories on which they were based had been debunked, Galen's concepts of sickness and its treatment continued to have a pervasive influence on the daily practice of medicine. Indeed, it is a measure of medicine's progress over the past fifty years that a goodly number of his remedies were still being used until well into the twentieth century."

"Poets, essayists, chroniclers, wags, and wise men write often about death but have rarely seem it. Physicians and nurses, who see it often, rarely write about it."

"Of hundreds of known diseases and their predisposing characteristics, some 85% of our aging population will succumb to the complications of one of only seven major entities: atherosclerosis, hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, obesity, mental depressing states such as Alzheimer's and other dementias, cancer, and decreased resistance to infection. Many of those elderly who die will have several of them. And not only that; the personnel of any large hospital's intensive care unit can confirm the everyday observation that terminally ill people are not infrequently victims of all seven."

"With deep sedation or the blessed respite of terminal coma that comes to some at the end of a difficult struggle, the actual hour when the heart stops is indeed often tranquil. Many do, in this way, avoid a tormented passage; but many others are in physical and mental distress till nearly the last moment, or even at the last moment."

"The tendency toward mysticism is ingrained in human nature. Superstition, religion, and medicine have made their long journey together, and even now are unable to let go of one another's hands."

"In its own unhurried way, age soundlessly and with persistence treads ever closer behind us on slippered feet, catches up, and finally blends itself into us—all while we are still denying its nearness."

"The later decades of a life become the time for our capabliites to find an unscattered focus, and in this way increase the force of their concentraled worth."

"As a consequence of disease and environmental forces, as well as other factors, a large number of polymorphisms may exist in a population. Some may be related to present selective forces, and others to forces which operated in the past, but which are no longer significant. Present gene frequencies may also result from gene mixture between populations."

"Viral hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver caused by at least six different, mostly unrelated, viruses [hepatitis viruses A, B, C, D, E, and G (HAV, HBV, HCV, HDV, HEV, and HGV, respectively)]. It can occur in an acute form from which most patients experience a complete recovery. Acute viral hepatitis is characterized by an insidious onset, often with fever and severe malaise and loss of appetite for food, alcohol, and tobacco. Flu-like symptoms may occur early in the illness. The characteristic finding that occurs in many cases is the development of jaundice, a dramatic yellow discoloration of the skin and other surfaces. Symptoms may last for days or weeks. The acute disease usually results in complete recovery with lifelong immunity. Occasionally, acute hepatitis may advance to the fulminant phase; the patient does not recover, but develops liver failure and death may be rapid. Fortunately, this is rare. Hepatitis due to HAV and HEV is nearly always acute. Acute disease also may occur with HBV and probably HGV. HCV is usually chronic."

"Primary cancer of the liver (hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide; HBV is the major cause of HCC. A vaccine that protects against HBV infection was invented in 1969 and is now one of the most commonly used vaccines. National vaccination programs have dramatically reduced the prevalence of HBV infection and carriers, with a concomitant decrease in the incidence of HCC in the vaccine-impacted populations. HBV vaccine is the first widely used cancer prevention vaccine; a second that protects against papilloma virus and cancer of the cervix has recently been introduced."

"In his early years as a physician, Baruch Blumberg developed a keen interest in the genetic polymorphisms and environmental factors that influence disease development. In particular, he was interested in the lipoprotein subtypes that predispose certain individuals to heart disease. As a scientific researcher, Blumberg, while studying these protein fractions, encountered an unusual protein in the serum of Australian aborigine patients with serum hepatitis."

"In 1982 Barry visited Taiwan, where the director of the blood bank at a major hospital in Taipei showed him large refrigerators full of blood from people infected with hepatitis B. What should they do with all these contaminated bottles of blood, the director asked? Barry’s answer: they should make hepatitis B vaccine. The Taiwanese hospital adopted his recommendation, which led by 1984 to Taiwan establishing the world’s first program of universal hepatitis B vaccination."

"This is material that is quite formidable, that is infecting people with inhalation anthrax, infecting them in the absence of direct contact. You can call it whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or weaponized or not weaponized. The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent."

"You've got to balance the compassionate-use aspect with trying to figure out whether it works."

"I'd say we have a couple of people who've recovered, they've gotten excellent medical care and the specific therapy, ZMapp … may have had a role in it but we don't know."

"There is no doubt they [Trump administration] will be faced with the challenges their predecessors were faced with ... we will definitely get surprised in the next few years"

"As experience has taught us more often than not the thing that is gonna hit us is something that we did not anticipate. Just the way we didn't anticipate , we didn't think there would be an Ebola that would hit cities. [...] If you develop an understanding of the commonalities of those, you can respond more rapidly."

": Bottom line. We don't have to worry about this one, right?"

"It’s a very, very low risk to the United States, but it’s something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously... It isn’t something the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about. Because we have ways of preparing and screening of people coming in [from China]. And we have ways of responding - like we did with this one case in Seattle, Washington, who had traveled to China and brought back the infection. [...] We’ve just got to make sure that we are totally prepared [since] infectious diseases will continue to emerge on the human species. And we’ve got to be essentially perpetually prepared."

"The only people who need masks are those who are already infected to keep from exposing others. The masks sold at drugstores aren't even good enough to truly protect anyone. If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn't really do much to protect you. People start saying, 'Should I start wearing a mask?' Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask."

"You don't want to go to war with a president [...] There's a temptation that you have to fight to tell the president what you think he wants to hear. I’ve seen really good people do that."

"I don't think that we are going to get out of this completely unscathed, I think that this is going to be one of those things we look back on and say boy, that was bad."

"It could be really, really bad. I don't think it's gonna be, because I think we'd be able to do the kind of mitigation. It could be mild. I don't think it's going to be that mild either. It's really going to depend on how we mobilize."

"It's really, really tough because you have to be honest with the American public and you don't want to scare the hell out of them. And then other times, in attempts to calm people down, [leaders] have had people be complacent about it. This is particularly problematic in a ‘gotcha” town like Washington."

"I feel like I'm 45. And I act like I'm 35. When I start to feel like I don't have the energy to do the job, whatever my age, I’ll walk away and write my book"

"Even before we knew it was a coronavirus, I said it certainly sounds like a coronavirus-SARS type thing. As soon as it was identified, I called a meeting of top-level people and said, 'Let's start working on a vaccine right now.'"

": There’s a lot of confusion among people, and misinformation, surrounding face masks. Can you discuss that?"

"I can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down. OK, he said it. Let's try and get it corrected for the next time."

"One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are -- for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable -- they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority. So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that -- and that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth. It's amazing sometimes the denial there is. It's the same thing that gets people who are anti-vaxxers, who don't want people to get vaccinated, even though the data clearly indicate the safety of vaccines. That's really a problem."

"We have to admit it, that that mixed message in the beginning, even though it was well meant to allow masks to be available for health workers, that was detrimental in getting the message across. No doubt about it."

"I don't regret that. At that time, there was a paucity of equipment that our health care providers needed -- who put themselves daily in harm's way of taking care of people who are ill. We did not want to divert masks and PPE away from them, to be used by the people."

"Getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security is just, I mean, it's amazing"

"It may be something that becomes endemic that we have to just be careful about. Certainly it's not going to be a pandemic for a lot longer because I believe the vaccines are going to turn that around."

"It’s almost like passing a baton in a race. You don’t want to stop, and then give it to somebody, you want to just essentially keep going"

"The answer is yes, a few, but one in particular. My youngest daughter’s boyfriend’s brother is a 32-year-old young man, athletic, healthy, who got COVID-19 and had one of the unusual complications of cardiomyopathy with an arrhythmia and died."

"I really feel strongly that we should get them vaccinated as soon as we possibly can. You want him fully protected as he enters into the presidency in January. So that would be my strong recommendation."

"...record numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, the sweetness is the light at the end of the tunnel, which I can tell you — as we get into January, February, March and April — that light is going to get brighter and brighter, and the bitterness is going to be replaced by the sweetness"

"And the reason I'm concerned and my colleagues in public health are concerned also is that we very well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year's, surge, and, as I have described it, as a surge upon a surge, because, if you look at the slope, the incline of cases that we have experienced as we have gone into the late fall and soon-to-be-early winter, it is really quite troubling. We are really at a very critical point. ... So I share the concern of President-elect Biden that as we get into the next few weeks, it might actually get worse."

"I was trying to let science guide our policy, but he was putting as much stock in anecdotal things that turned out not to be true as he was in what scientists like myself were saying. That caused unnecessary and uncomfortable conflict where I had to essentially correct what he was saying, and put me at great odds with his people."

"There's all of this concern about what's gain-of-function or what's not, with the implication that that research led to SARS-CoV-2, and COVID-19, which, George, unequivocally anybody that knows anything about viral biology and phylogeny of viruses know that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that were worked on to turn into SARS-CoV-2 because they were distant enough molecularly that no matter what you did to them, they could never, ever become SARS-CoV-2"

"This would not be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that looked good in initial safety actually made people worse. There was the history of the respiratory syncytial vaccine in children, which paradoxically made the children worse. One of the HIV vaccines that we tested some years ago actually made individuals more likely to get infected."

"We have immunological data and you have now clinical efficacy data. Everybody was asking the question: Where’s the clinical efficacy data? Now it has come out with the CDC MMWR this morning. So, we know it’s safe. We know that it is effective. So, my message and my final message — maybe the final message I give you from this podium — is that: Please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community. I urge you to visit Vaccines.gov to find a location where you can easily get an updated vaccine. And please do it as soon as possible."

"Fauci says 'we need to keep the politics out of' investigating COVID origins"

"Fauci suppressed off-label use of hydroxychloroquine by encouraging discussions of it to be pulled from social media, by sabotaging its clinical trials by testing doses six times the recommended levels (p. 26), and by pulling sixty-three million doses of the medicine off the market, safely away from covid sufferers they could have helped (p. 28). Fauci also provided cover for those who threatened doctors and pharmacists with loss of licenses and jobs for prescribing and dispensing hydroxychloroquine for covid (pp. 31–32). The story of ivermectin is similar."

"Neither Anthony Fauci, the CDC, WHO nor any medical governmental establishment has ever offered any early treatment other than Tylenol, hydration and call an ambulance once you have difficulty breathing. This is unprecedented in the entire history of medical care as early treatment of infections is critical to saving lives and preventing severe complications. Not only have these medical organizations and federal lapdogs not even suggested early treatment, they attacked anyone who attempted to initiate such treatment with all the weapons at their disposal—loss of license, removal of hospital privileges, shaming, destruction of reputations and even arrest."

"The real Anthony Fauci was a greedy egomaniac hell bent on creating an image of himself as the savior of the world during the AIDS crisis while generating billions in profits for his pharmaceutical industry “partners.” The “partners” would then share some of the loot with Fauci and others in various ways, including sharing in patent rights, the “revolving door” of very highly paid jobs for former government bureaucrats, paying multimillion dollar “user fees” to the NIAID, distributing shares of stock, etc."

"Then there was the 2005 “bird flu” hysteria where Fauci once again predicted “unprecedented carnage.” This time he partnered with Bill Gates and hired the now disgraced and discredited British conman statistician Neil Ferguson to construct “models” that predicted up to 150 million people could die from the bird flu. In the end, about 100 people died from it, and most probably had comorbidities that were the real causes of death. That was after President Bush asked Congress for $1.2 billion for Big Pharma to come up with another of its experimental vaccines."

"Documents recently revealed that the Fauci-led National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) authorized $1.68M in taxpayer dues to experiment on beagles. The documents obtained by the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a watchdog organization that investigates scientific research, said SRI International researched on beagles between October 2018 and February 2019. The experimentation, later deemed "unnecessary" by the FDA. According to the Daily Caller, the studies "involved force-feeding or injecting 44 beagle puppies aged 6-8 months old with an experimental drug before killing and dissecting them," and also "involved cutting the dogs' vocal cords so they could not bark, as well as experimentation on mice.""

"In a piece of legislation he introduced on Monday, Paul addressed the public’s growing weariness with the White House medical advisor by proposing to eliminate Fauci’s role as the director of NIAID altogether. “We’ve learned a lot over the past two years,” Paul said, “but one lesson, in particular, is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator-in-chief’…To ensure that ineffective, unscientific lockdowns and mandates are never foisted on the American people ever again, I’ve introduced this amendment to eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s position as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and divide his power into three separate new institutes.” So it’s no wonder Dr. Fauci is nervous. Things are about to get very interesting for “America’s Doctor.”"

"The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the at the . Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the , a claim without any scientific basis. On , Fauci did his best to further damage an already tanking economy by stating, “Right now, personally, myself, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant.” He has pushed for closing the entire country down for 14 days. Over what? A virus that has thus far killed just over 5,000 worldwide and less than 100 in the United States? By contrast, tuberculosis, an old disease not much discussed these days, killed nearly 1.6 million people in 2017. Where’s the panic over this? If anything, what people like Fauci and the other fearmongers are demanding will likely make the disease worse."

"Speaker to Anthony Fauci: And would you also weigh in on this issue of hydroxychloroquine? What do you think about this and what is the medical evidence?"

"Tony, Tony Fauci, he's a nice guy. He said it is not a threat, it is not a problem. Then he said do not wear a mask, don't not not not do not wear a mask under any circumstances But he's a nice guy so I keep him around."

"... the same message has to ... be reiterated over and over again, because either people don't hear it, or they don't believe it, or they don't adopt it."

"Don't tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election."

"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone."

"Fauci knew from the very beginning that covid likely came from a Chinese lab. He took active steps to suppress the information and defame anyone who talked about it. This should be one of the greatest scandals in the history of the US. But instead it barely makes a wave."

"This is the front line against terrible organisms. Like terrorism, you can’t fight it just within our borders. You’ve got to fight epidemic diseases where they emerge. [...] Either we help or hope we get lucky it isn’t an epidemic that travelers will catch or spread to our country."

"Several classes of antimicrobial agents (e.g., penicillins, cephalosporins, tetracyclines, chloramphenicol, and clindamycin) are useful in treatment of infections due to anaerobic bacteria. However, certain anaerobic bacteria have shown a striking resistance to antimicrobial agents. In vitro susceptibility tests are useful for selection of optimal therapy. The choice of agent depends, to some extent, on the organisms responsible for the infection. Bacteroides fragilis is the most commonly encountered anaerobe, and it is also the most resistant to antimicrobial agents. Other factors influencing the selection of therapy include pharmacologic characteristics, degree of bactericidal activity, and toxicity. Proper therapy for anaerobic infections often requires intensive antimicrobial therapy for a prolonged period. Surgical intervention, including drainage of abscesses and excision of necrotic tissue, is important."

"The bacteria typically described from biliary tract infection include Escherichia coli, Klebsiella, Enterobacter, and enterococci. It has also been recognized for some time that Clostridium perfringens may occasionally be involved in serious complications of biliary tract infection such as sepsis and emphysematous cholecystitis. Other anaerobes, including various Bacteroides and Fusobacterium sp, clostridia other than C perfringens, anaerobic cocci and streptococci, and Actinomyces have been reported from a variety of biliary tract infections, usually as single case reports ... More recently, several reports indicate that anaerobes, and especially B fragilis, may be more common in biliary tract infections than had been appreciated ... Anaerobes have been recovered in approximately 40% of such infections; B fragilis is the most common anaerobe encountered. Anaerobes may also be found, as aerobes are, in asymptomatic bactibilia."

"Anaerobic bacteria produce many different enzymes that are of importance in providing nutrients to the bacterial cell, as virulence factors, and in permitting organisms to colonize or survive under adverse conditions (including exposure to antimicrobial agents). Some enzymes effect several types of modifications to bile acids, neutral steroids, and corticosteroids. Anaerobes are clearly important in a variety of infections in humans and animals as well as in various other types of pathologic processes."

"There is an impressive incidence of anaerobes in major infections involving the lung and pleural space, intra-abdominal sites, and the female genital tract. Almost all anaerobic infections are endogenous in origin. Therapy consists of making the environment such that anaerobes find it difficult to proliferate, checking the spread of anaerobes into healthy tissues, and neutralizing the toxins of anaerobes."

"Anaerobes are prevalent on all mucosal surfaces and virtually all anaerobic infections are endogenous. Two thirds of anaerobic infections involve five anaerobic organisms or groups—the Bacteroides fragilis group, the Bacteroides melaninogenicus-Bacteroides asaccharolyticus group, Fusobacterium nucleatum, the anaerobic cocci, and Clostridium perfringens. Conditions that lower the oxidation-reduction potential and disrupt the mucosal surface (eg, vascular problems, malignant neoplasms, and surgery) lead to infection with anaerobes. Clues to anaerobic infection include foul odor, gas, tissue destruction, underlying malignant neoplasms, and the unique appearance of certain anaerobes on Gram's stain. Specimens must be collected to avoid normal flora and transported to the laboratory under anaerobic conditions. Therapy involves surgical débridement and drainage and the use of various antimicrobial agents. Antimicrobial agents must be used for extended periods to avoid relapse."

"The field of infectious diseases covers many entities that can be considered true medical emergencies. Included are meningitis, brain abscess, spinal epidural abscess, epiglottitis, pneumonia, bacteremia, endocarditis, certain intraabdominal infections, gas gangrene, and necrotizing fasciitis. Because emergencies related to infectious agents are potentially the most readily reversible of all medical emergencies, it behooves us to diagnose them as rapidly and specifically as possible so that appropriate life-saving therapy may be begun expeditiously."

"The commonly used drugs that have a major effect on the colonic flora are ampicillin, cefoperazone, clindamycin and oral neomycin or kanamycin, used together with either tetracycline, erythromycin or metronidazole."

"Most gastrointestinal infections secondary to the use of antimicrobial agents that have been documented are related to overgrowth of Clostridium difficile which produces a spectrum from severe pseudomembranous colitis to mild diarrhea or asymptomatic carriage. The most common inducers of pseudomembranous colitis or antimicrobial agent-associated diarrhea are ampicillin, clindamycin, and various cephalosporins, but almost all antimicrobials may cause this problem. Symptoms vary from watery to bloody diarrhea; the extent and severity of the diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps and the incidence of complications (such as toxic megacolon and perforation of the bowel) and of fatality are variable. Normal carriage of C. difficile in infants and asymptomatic carriage in adults who have received antimicrobial therapy make it impossible to rely on culture for diagnosis. The presence of cytotoxin or enterotoxin produced by C. difficile is much more reliable diagnostically, but there may be false-positives with this as well, particularly in infants."

"Anaerobic bacteria currently demonstrate increased resistance to antimicrobial agents, primarily by the production of beta-lactamase. A number of species of Bacteroides, most notably those in the Bacteroides fragilis group, produce these enzymes. A few species of Fusobacterium and Clostridium produce beta-lactamase as well. Fortunately, this mechanism of resistance is readily overcome by administering beta-lactamase inhibitors coupled with a beta-lactam antibiotic that would otherwise be inactivated. Other types of resistance encountered in anaerobic bacteria include inactivating enzymes such as chloramphenicol acetyltransferase, plasmid-mediated transferable multiple-drug resistance, changes in porin molecules in the outer membrane of the bacterial cell, decreased uptake of drug by other mechanisms, changes in the target organs such as penicillin-binding proteins, and decreased reduction of the antibiotic to an active intermediate product. In many institutions, certain drugs such as cefoxitin, clindamycin, and piperacillin, which were previously active against almost all strains of B. fragilis, are now effective against only 70 to 85% of this group of anaerobes."

"Much of the available data on the incidence of anaerobic infections is not reliable. Bacteriologic data without clinical correlation are not adequate, since the organisms are not necessarily significant. Similarly, clinical data with fragmentary bacteriological information are not ideal. In both types of papers, one often finds data on specimens cultured for anaerobes that clearly must have been contaminated with normal flora (for example, coughed sputum and voided urine). The exact specimen type and source is not always indicated or recognizable."

"Anaerobic or mixed anaerobic-aerobic pulmonary infection is important both in community-acquired disease and in the hospital setting. Its principal causes are aspiration of oral or gastic contents and of organisms involved in periodontal disease. Indeed, pneumonia following aspiration is undoubtedly the most common type of hospital-acquired pneumonia and as such is a major cause of death and disability in hospitalized patients. Both endogenous oral flora (primarily anaerobes and viridans streptococci) and hospital-acquired oral or gastric flora (such as Staphylococcus aureus, various members of the Enterobacteriaceae family, and Pseudomonas) may be involved in the infections. The principal complications are tissue destruction (necrotizing pneumonia), abscess formation, and thoracic empyema."

"... (1) What is the clinical relevance of anaerobic bacteriology? (2) How can the microbiologist, with limited and decreasing resources, perform reliable, detailed studies of anaerobic bacteriology? (3) When and how should susceptibility testing be done with anaerobes? If the clinician knows the usual bacteriology of various types of infection and how this may be modified by pathophysiologic processes in the host or by prior therapy, he/she can use a logical empiric approach to treatment of the patient. As to the microbiologist's dilemma, it is not realistic or rational for a microbiologist in a nonteaching hospital to do detailed bacteriologic studies and routine anaerobic susceptibility testing. The resources available should be committed primarily to the patient who is seriously ill. Such allocation of resources, of course, requires repeated and effective communication between microbiologist and clinician."

"It has been a hundred years since the role of anaerobic bacteria and, especially, non-spore-forming anaerobes in infections began to be appreciated."

"The most clinically important anaerobes are the five genera of Gram-negative rods. Bacteroides, especially the B. fragilis group (made of up ten species, one of which is the species B. fragilis), is particularly important. The other Gram-negative genera are Prevotella, Porphyromonas, Fusobacterium, and Bilophila. Among the Gram-positive anaerobes, there are cocci (primarily Peptostreptococcus) and sporeforming (Clostridium) and non-sporeforming bacilli (especially Actinomyces and Propionibacterium)."

"... a recent study of ours employing the powerful pyrosequencing technique on stools of subjects with regressive autism showed that Desulfovibrio was more common in autistic subjects than in controls. We subsequently confirmed this with pilot cultural and real-time PCR studies and found siblings of autistic children had counts of Desulfovibrio that were intermediate, suggesting possible spread of the organism in the family environment. Desulfovibrio is an anaerobic bacillus that does not produce spores but is nevertheless resistant to aerobic and other adverse conditions by other mechanisms and is commonly resistant to certain antimicrobial agents (such as cephalosporins) often used to treat ear and other infections that are relatively common in childhood. This bacterium also produces important virulence factors and its physiology and metabolism position it uniquely to account for much of the pathophysiology seen in autism."

"A watershed in my life was getting divorced in Puerto Rico—that was my second marriage—and leaving Puerto Rico to become part of the women’s movement. In my formation as a professional, there was always a kind of pressure to deny or not use a lot of your personal experience. The science of medicine, to some degree, negates the human, feeling, experiential part of it. But I was now discovering a whole other world out there through my personal experience of a deceptive marriage. That triggered quite a bit of growth in me toward understanding what happens internally to people, what happens in their lives and what they can do or not do…So I went back to New York and I got very involved in reproductive rights. I began to join in the women’s movement. At Barnard College there was a conference called the First International Conference on Abortion Rights that was attended by a few thousand women…We organized one of the first consciousness-raising groups of Latino women…A number of incredible things emerged from women talking about their experiences…We shared and we became very bonded. That was the beginning of my identification with women’s issues and reproductive health."

"My mother was a schoolteacher who fought for reforms such as the right to teach in Spanish, the vernacular,” she explained. “English was imposed upon the Puerto Rican school system when the US military invaded in 1898."

"In Puerto Rico, racism was subtle. There wasn't the kind of separatist racism like in the US. I wasn't used to this."

"I saw that anybody who could afford an abortion could get a perfectly fine one. It would be written up as an appendectomy. Women from the US used to go to Havana to get abortions."

"What brought me to the women's movement was the women's health movement. The cultural elements of feminism didn't resonate with me, but abortion resonated with me. I became part of the women's movement in October 1970 at an international meeting on abortion rights attended by several thousand women and held at Barnard College in New York City."

"Women brought a feminist perspective to health issues affecting women. They examined power relationships among individuals and between individuals and systems. The very early drafts of Our Bodies, Ourselves, by the Boston Women's Health Collective, which was seminal in all this, said we need to know our bodies, we need to know what makes us healthy and what threatens our health, and we need to negotiate or confront the health care system to get the best possible health from it."

"The only way to effect change was for more women to go into the professions and instill a different perspective—a more human touch and a more respectful relationship with patients."

"The women's movement was very diverse, but the more public positions articulated by the movement didn't include the experiences or concerns of women of color or of poor women."

"We got a lot of flack from White women who had private doctors and wanted to be sterilized,” she said. “They had been denied their request for sterilization because of their status (unmarried), or the number of their children (usually the doctor thought they had too few). They therefore opposed a waiting period or any other regulation that they interpreted as limiting access . . . While young white middle class women were denied their requests for sterilization, low income women of certain ethnicity were misled or coerced into them"

"APHA has always provided a home for people in public health with a broad view of what public health is. Public health is really about people's life conditions and how these conditions do or do not promote health. APHA is committed to equity and ending all barriers, and has always been committed to civil, human and health rights. It's a wonderful place for women to be."

"We still have a system that excludes, underserves, and even misserves all too many people. The latest census tells us that there are over 44 million Americans without health insurance. That is inexcusable. The failed social policies of the past few decades have widened the gaps between rich and poor, well and poorly educated, medically indigent and consumers of elective high-tech surgery, owners of multi-mansions and the homeless. We need health, but above all we need to create a grounding for healthy public policy that redresses and salvages the growing inequities. We cannot achieve a healthier us without achieving a healthier, more equitable health care system, and ultimately, a more equitable society."

"Here, Sir, you behold hundreds of poor children of Africa sharing with those of a lighter hue in the blessings of education; and, while it will be our great pleasure to remember the great deeds you have done for America, it will be our delight also to cherish the memory of General Lafayette as a friend to African emancipation and as a member of this institution."

"While leafing through a pile of the press clippings that regularly cross my desk at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I was struck particularly by two headlines in the ' (May 31, 1991;sect A:1) that said, "Menopause Becoming 'Au Courant' as It Hits Women of Baby Boom" and, as the article continued on another page, "Menopause Comes of Age as Medical and Social Issue." Indeed, , in general—in terms of research, services, and access to care—has come of age and become a priority medically, socially, and politically."

"Yentl, the 19th-century heroine of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story, ... had to disguise herself as a man to attend school and study the . Being "just like a man" has historically been a price women have had to pay for equality. Being different from men has meant being second-class and less than equal for most of recorded time and throughout most of the world. It may therefore be sad, but not surprising, that women have all too often been treated less than equally in social relations, political endeavors, business, education, research, and health care."

"... You can easily find charts of ideal weight ranges: the tables of and the are the most reliable. But those charts can be confusing by giving wide ranges and often lumping men and women together. So I suggest that if you've picked up more than fifteen extra pounds or weigh more than 15% of your ideal body weight according to those charts, talk to your doctor. Is the weight a new gain, or have you maintained it for years? Are you currently ?"

"is good for a woman's heart. While generally accepted when the estrogen is produced naturally, this theory has been a matter of great controversy when the estrogen is administered "artificially" in (HRT) for women during and after . After a half century of conflicting data, we can affirm with growing confidence that, at the very least, estrogen reduces key cardiovascular risk factors in women at a time when they become especially vulnerable to heart disease, namely, after 50 years of age."

"Any kind of can be a very scary and daunting experience. But knowing how to navigate the and what to expect, at each step, may be the best antidote."

"Dr. Bernadine Healy is perhaps best known for leading some of the largest, most respected medical institutions in the country. But on Valentine's Day 1999, she was dealt a blow that shattered her world. That was the night when Healy found out that she had brain cancer. Doctors gave her three months live without treatment. With , her chances increased to 18 months to two years. But eight years later, Healy is still thriving. Her book, "Living Time," is written from two perspectives — that of the physician and that of the patient -- about her fight against brain cancer. She hopes it will help people diagnosed with the disease to realize that cancer isn't "dying time" — it's "living time.""

"When I heard about doctors in Italy having to ration ventilators and then the incredibly likely possibility that that is going to happen here, my first thought was so many Black people are going to die."

"Doing that work is the true joy of training the next generation of scientists and clinicians who are going to be doing science differently, who are going to be translating science into care differently"

"That is so critical. Because I’m training the young women who are going to go into these fields, we don’t want them to be harassed out of them,"

"We all have a responsibility to create and sustain environments where women can not only compete, but can thrive. Institutions of higher education have had to rethink some of their models amid the pandemic and find new ways to provide experiential opportunities for students amid remote learning and, in some cases, this has led to new partnerships and collaborations between companies and organizations and colleges and universities."

"To be able to heal confers an obligation to heal, In an atmosphere of mistrust, it is critically important for clinical physicians and physician scientists to be able to translate their knowledge, their practice, and their science into the public domain."

"Do not allow your mind to be imprisoned by majority thinking. Remember that the limits of science are not the limits of imagination."

"To me, it was home and a place of happy memories, and I grew up believing I was rich."

"Although I chose a path in cornea and cataract surgery for my specialization, I could not help but be impacted by my observations of the prevalence of blindness among African Americans"

"Eyesight is a basic human right"

"I wasn’t seeking to be first. I was just doing my thing, and I wanted to serve humanity along the way—to give the gift of sight."

"“Philosophically, I like to think that my greatest accomplishment has to be those moments when I’ve helped someone regain eyesight, when I remove the patient’s patch and he starts with the big E and goes all the way down to the 20/20 line.”"

"“Service to the underserved was a natural evolution of my life from my Harlem roots,”"

"“When I was offered an office not equivalent to that of my male colleagues, I could’ve started marching. But I felt it was more important to focus on the prize.”"

""Hater-ation, segregation, racism, that’s the noise — you have to ignore that and keep your eyes focused on the"

"My parents believed that with enough education, I could own the world,"

"When I began my residency training at New York University, I had no idea that I was the first and only African-Americans ophthalmology resident. I did not know, or even care! But I did know that my superior grades, scores and credentials had earned me a coveted spot in a highly competitive residency, and that was awesome. I was happy and excited that I was about to capture my dream and become a great ophthalmologist by training in one of the most prestigious programs in the USA."

"The biggest challenge I overcame in my career was wanting to do research, but not having the funding or a lab to do it in. When I encountered discrimination, I stayed focused on my goal and worked to outsmart the racism I faced – with ingenuity, rather than wasting my time and energy complaining about it."

"I hope that through my past legacy and future advocacy, that the current and future generations of young scientists will not experience the hurtful wounds of discrimination of any kind."

"Taking the high road may be arduous and long, but it will lead to justice and triumph."

"I’ve achieved so much in my career, and it’s important to me that I pass on the torch and help to inspire others to get involved in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) – whatever their backgrounds or circumstances."

"Being poor shouldn’t hold you back either – when I talk to disadvantaged school kids about poverty, I tell them that the label of “poor” is a tactical assault of naming and shaming."