All Quotes

"Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too."

"The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed."

"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."

"Her chief contribution to the inheritance of the race has been that, besides demonstrating in action the full perfection of the allied arts of nursing and sanitation, she has left in her writings a philosophy, as it were, of nursing, together with an intellectual demonstration of the scientific and natural basis of hygiene and its practical application, and has laid down once and for all their essential underlying principles with a clarity, a logic, an originality, and a depth of reflection that mark the genius and place her works among the classics."

"Great as Miss Nightingale was as a nurse, her nursing reflected only a part of her genius. She was, perhaps, even greater as a teacher, and without a doubt greatest as a sanitarian. Though it was by her nursing that she seized and held the hearts and imaginations of men—so that those who know nothing further of her know that she was the heroine of the Crimea and the reformer of nursing,—it is the intellectual quality of her deep insight into problems of health that keeps her work and will always keep it fresh and vivid."

"In the really hard cases you're choosing between the disastrous and the catastrophic, and it's hard to tell someone which one is which."

"Miss Nightingale in appearance, is just what you would expect in any other well-bred woman, who may have seen perhaps rather more than thirty years of life; her manner and countenance are prepossessing, and this without the possession of positive beauty; it is a face not easily forgotten, pleasing in its smile, with an eye betokening great self possession, and giving when she wishes, a quiet look of firm determination to every feature. Her general demeanour is quiet and rather reserved; still I am much mistaken if she is not gifted with a very lively sense of the ridiculous. In conversation, she speaks on matters of business with a grave earnestness, one would not expect from her appearance. She has evidently a mind disciplined to restrain under the principles of the action of the moment, every feeling which would interfere with it. She has trained herself to command, and learned the value of conciliation towards others, and constraint over herself. I can conceive her to be a strict disciplinarian; she throws herself into a work—as it's Head—as such she knows well how much success must depend upon literal obedience to her every order. She seems to understand business thoroughly, though to me she had the failure common to many "Heads," a too great love of management in the small details which had better perhaps have been left to others. Her nerve is wonderful; I have been with her at very severe operations; she was more than equal to the trial. She has an utter disregard of contagion; I have known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The more awful to every sense any particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, her slight form would be seen bending over him, administering to his ease in every way in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him."

"Miss Nightingale raised the art of nursing in this country from a menial employment to an honoured vocation; she taught nurses to be ladies, and she brought ladies out of the bondage of idleness to be nurses. This, which was the aim of her life, was no fruit of her Crimean experience, although that experience enabled her to give effect to her purpose more readily than were otherwise possible. Long before she went to the Crimea she felt deeply the "disgraceful antithesis" between Mrs. Gamp and a sister of mercy. The picture of her at Scutari is of a strong-willed, strong-nerved energetic woman, gentle and pitiful to the wounded, but always masterful among those with whom she worked. After the war she worked with no less zeal or resolution, and realised many of her early dreams. She was not only the reformer of nursing but a leader of women."

"If our social arrangements were so adjusted that each person could follow that calling in life which they are by nature adapted for, what a great gainer society as a whole would be. These few who are so fortunate as to be able to follow the calling of their heart’s desire make a success of life. Florence Nightingale was one of the fortunate few, who could engage in that occupation for which she was best adapted. Florence Nightingale was a born nurse. In her was found that rare combination of heart, brain and sympathy which makes the ideal nurse. It is when one is laid low by the ravages of disease that they can appreciate to its utmost depth the value of human kindness...In the future, when the war drum will be heard no more, and the only reveille to be sounded will be that which shall call men to the peaceful walks of life, the name of Florence Nightingale will be revered, as a woman who, though delicate and far removed from want, nevertheless was willing to risk her own life, that she might bring relief to that most stupid victim of our present system, the soldier."

"The woman activist or artist born of a family-centered mother may in any case feel that her mother cannot understand or sympathize with the imperatives of her life; or that her mother has preferred and valued a more conventional daughter, or a son. In order to study nursing, Florence Nightingale was forced to battle, in the person of her mother, the restrictive conventions of upper-class Victorian womanhood, the destiny of a life in drawing rooms and country houses in which she saw women going mad "for want of something to do.""

"Emily Dickinson was always stirred by the existences of women like George Eliot or Elizabeth Barrett, who possessed strength of mind, articulateness, and energy. (She once characterized Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale as "holy"-one suspects she merely meant, "great.")"

"I had been in the "home" less than a week when an invitation came from Miss Nightingale for me to visit her in her London home. Shall I ever forget the excitement that invitation caused? Miss Crossland told me Miss Nightingale would ask my opinion of the different nurses, both ladies and others, and I could see that there was a little anxiety felt concerning the answers I might give. I went on the appointed day and must say I did not feel quite at my ease as the maid took me to Miss Nightingale's room, but one look into those kind, clear-blue eyes, and the hearty grasp of the little hand quite set me at ease, and before I knew it I was talking as freely to her, who had done more than any one woman living to alleviate suffering, as I would have to a life-long friend."

"I went from Edinburgh for a few days with Miss Nightingale, and received from her words of encouragement which have lasted all these years. In one of her letters to me just as I was leaving England she bade me and our profession "god-speed," saying, "Outstrip us, that we in turn may outstrip you again.""

"Every element of army hygiene, diet, shelter, ventilation, latrines, clothing, rest periods, provision of orderlies, was to be codified. Miss Nightingale, drawing upon excellent advice from her Crimea cronies, provided the codes. Together the Notes constitute an astonishing example of her gift for imagining palpable needs and assembling workable remedies. She was creating a self-acting, self-regulating system, embodying individual will-power in action, designed to secure the maximum output of useful work for the total money and manpower expended."

"Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does."

"Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay."

"Economic life, as always, is a matrix in which result becomes cause and cause becomes result."

"She is rather high in stature, fair in complexion, and slim in person; her hair is brown, and is worn quite plain; her physiognomy is most pleasing; her eyes, of a bluish tint, speak volumes, and are always sparkling with intelligence; her mouth is small and well formed, while her lips act in unison, and make known the impression of her heart—one seems the reflex of the other. Her visage, as regards expression, is very remarkable, and one can almost anticipate by her countenance what she is about to say: alternately, with matters of the most grave import, a gentle smile passes radiantly over her countenance, thus proving her evenness of temper; at other times, when wit or a pleasantry prevails, the heroine is lost in the happy, good-natured smile which pervades her face, and you recognise only the charming woman. Her dress is generally of a greyish or black tint; she wears a simple white cap, and often a rough apron. In a word, her whole appearance is religiously simple and unsophisticated. In conversation no member of the fair sex can be more amiable and gentle than Miss Nightingale. Removed from her arduous and cavalier-like duties, which require the nerve of a Hercules,—and she possesses it when required,—she is Rachel on the stage in both tragedy and comedy."

"Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form, and the hand of the spoiler distressingly high, there is that incomparable woman sure to be seen; her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort even amid the struggles of expiring nature. She is a "ministering angel" without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds."

"We have made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance and are delighted and very much struck with her great gentleness, simplicity, and wonderful clear and comprehensive head. I wish we had her at the War Office. Her modesty and unselfishness are really hardly to be believed, and she is so ladylike."

"Florence Nightingale lifted the vague, casual, though kindly and devoted, feeling of women into organized, efficient and invaluable service; she enlarged the nurse’s vision to sympathy for great groups outside her family or particular tribe."

"Her position in Indian affairs was even more extraordinary than her position at the War Office. She had never been to India, she never did go to India, and yet she was considered an expert on India and consulted on its affairs by men who had lived there all their working lives. This knowledge was the reward of her enormous labours on the Station Reports. To her bedroom had come a return from almost every military station in India, not from one Presidency or one district but the entire Peninsula. Year after year she had toiled, examining, classifying, grouping. She possessed prodigious powers of absorbing, retaining, and marshaling masses of facts, and when she had completed her task the whole vast teeming country lay before her mind's eye like a map."

"The drop of rain maketh a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling."

"The poorest ploughman is in Christ equal with the greatest prince that is. Let them therefore have sufficient to maintain them…"

"And now I would ask a strange question: who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England that passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell for I know him who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you: it is the devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all others; he is never out of his diocese; he is never from his cure; ye shall never find him unoccupied; he is ever in his parish; he keepeth residence at all times; ye shall never find him out of the way, call for him when you will he is ever at home; the diligentest preacher in all the realm; he is ever at his plough; no lording nor loitering can hinder him; he is ever applying his business, ye shall never find him idle, I warrant you. And his office is to hinder religion, to maintain superstition, to set up idolatry, to teach all kind of popery. He is ready as he can be wished for to set forth his plough; to devise as many ways as can be to deface and obscure God's glory...O that our prelates would be as diligent to sow the corn of good doctrine as Satan is to sow cockle and darnel."

"Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."

"Saviour! teach me, day by day, Love's sweet lesson to obey; Sweeter lesson cannot be, Loving Him who first loved me. Charity is the very livery of Christ."

"My father was delighted to teach me to shoot with the bow. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body to the bow; not to draw with strength of arm as other nations do, but with the strength of the body."

"In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well."

"You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon."

"Also present, as a kind of co-host, was the rector of the state university. He asked me if I knew the difference between capitalism and socialism. In capitalism man exploits man. In socialism it is just the reverse."

"There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting."

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

"People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first."

"The imperatives of technology and organization, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economic society....I am led to the conclusion that we are the servants in thought, as in action, of the machines we have created to serve us."

"Meetings are a great trap. … they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."

"You will find that [the] State [Department] is the kind of organisation which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too."

"In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability."

"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."

"Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths."

"Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom."

"Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs."

"Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."

"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence."

"Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man... begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies."

"Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant."

"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."

"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."

"There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth."

"In the first place I identify this ["the equilibrium of poverty"] with primitive agriculture, and two factors have been at work there. One is, of course, population growth. If you were a poor farmer in India, Pakistan, or in much of Africa, you would want as many sons as possible as your social security. They would keep you out of the hot sun and give you some form of subsistence in your old age. So, you have pressure for population growth that is, itself, the result of the extreme economic insecurity. This is something which hasn't been sufficiently emphasized."