Black Plague Quotes

Of the few who were not afraid to witness the burial of a witch and who had gone to the cemetery, some had come just to verify her being put away but stayed to sing 'Shall We Gather at the River' for politeness' sake, quite unaware of the bleak promise of their song. Others came to see that nothing go awry, that the shallow-minded and small-hearted kept their meanness at bay, and that the entire event be characterized by that abiding gentleness of spirit to which they themselves had arrived by the simple determination not to let anything--anything at all: not failed crops, not rednecks, lost jobs, sick children, rotten potatoes, broken pipes, bug-ridden flour, third-class coal, educated social workers, thieving insurance men, garlic-ridden hunkies, corrupt Catholics, racist Protestants, cowardly Jews, slaveholding Moslems, jack-leg nigger preachers, squeamish Chinamen, cholera, dropsy or the Black Plague, let alone a strange woman--keep them from their God. ~ Toni Morrison

Have a care, Sir Tucker, lest you find yourself in the stockades."
He scoffs and looks at Mr. Erikson. "She can't do that, can she? She's not the ruler of this class. Brady is."
...
"You could strip him of his title," suggests Brady, apparently not minding at all that I have usurped his throne. "Make him a serf."
"Yeah," says Christian. "Make him a serf. Being a serf blows."
As a serf, poor Christian has already been killed several times in our class. Aside from dying of the Black Plague on the first day, he's starved to death, had his hands cut off for stealing a loaf of bread, and been run down by his master's horse just for kicks. He's like Christian the fifth now. ~ Cynthia Hand

She could have had a heart attack!" Jenny insisted. "Oh, please, Ruthie's an unstoppable force of nature, like the Black Plague or Richard Simmons. ~ Molly Harper

We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer - and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. ~ Tom Van Vleck

In Siena, where more than half the inhabitants died of the plague, work was abandoned on the great cathedral, planned to be the largest in the world, and never resumed, owing to loss of workers and master masons and "the melancholy and grief" of the survivors. The cathedral's truncated transept still stands in permanent witness to the sweep of death's scythe. Agnolo di Tura, a chronicler of Siena, recorded the fear of contagion that froze every other instinct. 'Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another,' he wrote, 'for this plague seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship.… And I, Angolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands, and so did many others likewise. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place. ~ Iain Pears

Overworking is the Black Plague of the 21st Century. Leave the office on time by using the time you have effectively. An executive at a Fortune 100 told me that to him, if you stay at work late, that means 'you're slow. ~ Richie Norton

Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But, after all, it is an overstatement.
If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their trust in The Health Board ... ~ Mark Twain

Thank you, Sick Husband, because what I mistakenly thought was just your cold with a minor fever is apparently something closer to onset Black Plague with a side of liver disease. According to your indications, you're presenting pandemic symptoms from Europe, circa 1300 AD. We should alert the CDC! I mean, sure, I pulled off carpool, dinner, homework tutoring, and four kids' practices last week when I had strep and the flu, but you just stay in bed with your scratchy throat. We don't want to infect the children. ~ Jen Hatmaker

This sludge oozes like a dying sea snake, though it tastes like it's already dead. Some evil force made up this concoction, intending to release it to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. But the creator made the mistake of tasting his creation and passed on. The world was saved for a moment. Still, like the black plague, this thing refused to fade out forever. I'm sad to report that our good friend Cliff behind the bar rediscovered it. Now it's spreading around the world as if carried by rats. ~ Ace Boggess

Love is not something we must try hard to do, love comes naturally, it is trusting that love is enough - That is the hard thing to do. It sounds simple, but even when the simple answer is right in front of us, since the feeling is complicated, we often pass up the right answer to look for a complicated answer to match it.
In the 1300s somewhere between seventy-five and two-hundred million people died from the black plague, which was a bacteria carried by fleas. Fleas are not a new problem, and the cure has been widely known long before the 1300s. It was simply to shave your hair off, wear clothes made from something coarse like goat hair, and to cover your skin in ash. The fleas lay eggs that stick to our hair, and with the hair gone, there is nowhere for the eggs to stick. The ash has the chemical hydroxide, which is enough to make the skin unlivable for the fleas.
Everyone knew that anyone with a shaved head and ash on their skin meant that they knew they had fleas. To avoid the shame, many people would rather put up with the fleas, as long as other people didn't think they had them. Maybe the quote before Mark Twain coined his was, "It's better to keep your hair and appear free from fleas than shave your head and remove all doubt."
Besides itching and inflammation, fleas were fine… sort of… that is, until those fleas got infected with the plague, and spread that deadly infection. Instead of shaving their heads, people tried any other thing, and about half o ~ Michael Brent Jones

Should trouble come, in the dark of night, be it fire or war or black plague, save my children, then my wife, then my tea chest and kettle. With these I can live, quite contentedly. I need nothing else on my estates. ~ Bernard-Paul Heroux

According to his dad's journal, vampires had been through some of the worst epidemics in history. And apparently, during the days of the Black Plague, their biggest complaint had been rotten "food". ~ Heather Brewer

Accounts from Europe indicate that the danse macabre took another form, inspired by the Black Death, rather like our children's rhyme 'Ring o' Ring o' Roses', which refers to the Great Plague. In 1374, a fanatical sect of dancers appeared in the Rhine, convinced that they could put an end to the epidemic by dancing for days and allowing other people to trample on their bodies. It is not recorded whether they recovered but, incredibly, they began to raise money from bystanders. By the time they reached Cologne they were 500 strong, dancing like demons, half-naked with flowers in their hair. Regarded as a menace by the authorities, these dancers macabre were threatened with excommunication. ~ Catharine Arnold

The odds of surviving are not good for serfs, or clerics, since they tended the sick, but miraculously I survive. Mr. Erikson rewards me with a laminated badge that reads, I SURVIVED THE BLACK PLAGUE.
Mom will be so proud. ~ Cynthia Hand

I Survived the Black Plague ~ Cynthia Hand

With his heart falling into a black abyss, Thomas pulled the trigger.
- pg.250 ~ James Dashner

the devil is not so black as he is painted. ~ George Bernard Shaw

This striking result suggests that our quest for safety, and our resulting fear of difference, has fostered a justice system that discriminates against black defendants. Put simply, under some circumstances a black man who looks "more black" is 33 percent more likely to receive the death penalty than is a black man who commits the same crime but looks less stereotypically black. Inequalities like these illuminate the sad truth that our hidden, unconscious attitudes toward minorities evolve far more slowly than our overt spoken attitudes. Many of those ugly views are so well hidden that we're not even aware that we hold them. In ~ Adam Alter

I feel no obligation to teach my readers anything, to impart any sort of wisdom, to teach any sort of lesson, to instill any sort of morality. All I'm trying to do is make them and their parents laugh. ~ Michael Ian Black

Justice
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes. ~ Langston Hughes

Could it be that my circle is largely black and that it is why I am influential in black circles but not in white circles? ~ Louis Farrakhan

By a curious coincidence, as each point was recalled, the black wizards of Ashantee would strike up with their hatchets, as in ominous comment on the white stranger's thoughts. Pressed by such enigmas and portents, it would have been almost against nature, had not, even into the least distrustful heart, some ugly misgivings obtruded. ~ Herman Melville

They stood brow to brow, brown to white, black to black, he supporting her elbows, she playing her limp light fingers over his collarbone, and how he "ladored,"he said, the dark aroma of her hair blending with crushed lily stalks, Turkish cigarettes and the lassitude that comes from "lass." "No, no, don't," she said, I must wash, quick-quick, Ada must wash; but for yet another immortal moment they stood embraced in the hushed avenue, enjoying as they had never enjoyed before, the "happy-forever" feeling at the end of never-ending fairy tales. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

South Africa, with US support, after the fall of the Portuguese empire, invaded Angola and Mozambique to establish their own puppet regime there. They were trying to protect Namibia, to protect apartheid, and nobody did much about it; but the Cubans sent forces, and furthermore they sent black soldiers and they defeated a white mercenary army, which not only rescued Angola but it sent a shock throughout the continent-it was a psychic shock-white mercenaries were purported to be invincible, and a black army defeated them and sent them back fleeing into South Africa. ~ Noam Chomsky

That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate. ~ David Bradley

To Galen's relief, they reached the silver and pearl gate before Rose could convince Pansy to tell her any more. He rode in the boat with Jonquil and her prince, who was not as stoic as his brothers.
"What did you eat for dinner?" the dark prince huffed.
"What do you mean?" Jonquil frowned at her escort as he rowed.
"You're so heavy, it's like you're wearing iron underthings," he panted.
"Oh!" Jonquil whacked her prince on the shoulder with her fan. "How rude!"
When their boat reached the island and the black palace, Jonquil leaped out without waiting for assistance. She stalked into the palace ahead of everyone else, with her prince scuttling at her heels, apologizing every step of the way. ~ Jessica Day George

In the fall of the year I turned sixteen, I jumped out of my bedroom window and ran away. The night's black roads wound like long stretches of river. … The streets ribboned out in all directions. I lifted first one foot and then the other, ready to run down all of them ~ Lê Thi Diem Thúy

Okay, here's the first speech. You guys know what 'black' means, right? It means a program or project that is not acknowledged by the government. People pretend it doesn't exist. The Campus takes that one step further: We really do not exist. There is not a single written document in the possession of any government employee that has a single word about us. From this moment on, you two young gentlemen do not exist. ~ Tom Clancy

What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood. ~ Alice Walker

and if you run off down the long streets in the way you are doing - then for this evening, you have broken utterly from your family, who fade away into insubstantiality, while you yourself, absolutely solid, black and clear-cut, slapping your thighs, rise and assume your true form. ~ Franz Kafka

I made this movie for $40,000, which was this little black-and-white horror film called Dementia 13, which we made in about nine days. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power. ~ James Stockdale

Nobody chased her. But that was nobody's fault, really, not in a city of this size. It was only the callousness of four hundred thousand people, blending into a single blue-black pool of unconcern. That's what we copper stars are for, I think... to be the few who stop and look. ~ Lyndsay Faye

Birmingham has proved that no matter what you're up against, if wave after wave of black people keep coming prepared to go to jail, sooner or later there is such confusion, such social dislocation, that white people in the South are faced with a choice: either integrated restaurants or no restaurants at all, integrated public facilities or none at all. And the South then must make its choice for integration, for it would rather have that than chaos.

This struggle is only beginning in the North, but it will be a bitter struggle. It will be an attack on business, on trade unions, and on the government. The Negro will no longer tolerate a situation where for every white man unemployed there are two or three Negroes unemployed. In the North, Negroes present a growing threat to the social order that, less brutally and more subtly than the South, attempts to keep him "in his place." In response, moderates today warn of the danger of violence and "extremism" but do not attempt to change conditions that brutalize the Negro and breed racial conflict. What is needed is an ongoing massive assault on racist political power and institutions. ~ Bayard Rustin

Let us suppose you give your three-year-old daughter a coloring book and a box of crayons for her birthday. The following day, with the proud smile only a little once can muster, she presents her first pictures for inspection. She has colored the sun black, the grass purple, and the sky green. In the lower right-hand corner, she has added woozy wonders of floating slabs and hovering rings; on the left, a panoply of colorful, carefree squiggles. You marvel at her bold strokes and intuit that her psyche is railing against its own cosmic punniness in the face of a big, ugly world. Later at the office, you share with your staff your daughter's first artistic effort and you make veiled references to the early work of van Gogh.

A little child can not do a bad coloring; nor can a child of God do bad prayer. "A father is delighted when hi little one, leaving off her toys and friends, runs to him and climbs into his arms. AS he hold shi little one close to him, he cared little whether the child is looking around, her attention flittering from one thing to another or just settling down to sleep. Essentially the child is choosing to be with the father, confident of the love, the care, the security that is hers in those arms. Our prayer is much like that. We settle down in our Father's arms, in his loving hands. Our minds, our thougths, our imagination may flit about here and there; we might even fall asleep; but essentially we are choosing for thi time to remian intimately wi ~ Brennan Manning

She strode across the McGraney boundary without a backward glance, legs cutting twin swatches in the green-black grass. Dawn sunlight simmered on the tip of each blade, and Holly's passage set a surging ripple of light flashing across the meadow.
Extraordinary, thought Artemis. What have I lost? ~ Eoin Colfer

We're in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--"Don't ask any questions!" "No discussion!" "Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!" And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There's nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.

So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.


Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It's too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories fr ~ Camille Paglia

One of the things that made the Black Muslim movement grow was its emphasis upon things African. This was the secret to the growth of the Black Muslim movement. African blood, African origin, African culture, African ties. And you'd be surprised - we discovered that deep within the subconscious of the black man in this country, he is still more African than he is American. ~ Malcolm X

She remembered thinking falling for him would be like falling in love with darkness, but now she imagined he was more like a starry night: the constellations were always there, constant, magnificent guides against the ever-present black. ~ Stephanie Garber

Human beings are not black and white. ~ Hugh Panaro

You don't think it was because a white man wrote it, a black man wrote it, a green man wrote it. What - doesn't make a difference! Doesn't make a difference. I think he did a good job. ~ Cab Calloway

I'll never admit that I'm an actor, because the next horrible follow-up question is always, "Oh, what have I seen you in?" ~ Michael Ian Black

It was a musty sweet smell. "Is this plague city? ~ Thaddeus Nowak

That's family for you. Can't live with them, can't murder them. ~ Holly Black

It feels good to be fighting someone other than myself."

Jude "The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air #3)". Apple Books. ~ Holly Black

Each day I deceived myself, unlike you who could never deceive yourself. Anxiety was trapped in the depths of my heart, like a formation of black clouds I could not break free of. ~ Osamu Dazai

But we didn't have the financial structure, like the right attorneys, the right managers, the right accountants, and we were going against the grain of what black entertainers is supposed to do. ~ Solomon Burke

Terror is a powerful agent in overcoming the contumacious and self willed disposition, and is made use of in government, in religion, and in education.

The passion may be excited by the mere prospect of great suffering, but still more effectually by unknown dangers, uncertainties, and vast possibilities of evil, in matters keenly felt by the hearers.

The approach of unexperienced calamities is out to engender panic. Under a plague or epidemic people may be easily frightened into measures that in cool moments they would repudiate.

The sick and the depressed can readily be inspired with religious and moral terrors. History furnishes many examples of political oratory succeeding through the excitement of terror. ~ Alexander Bain

Seen under the microscope, Stegomyia is a creature of striking beauty. Its general color is dark gray, but the thorax is marked with a silvery-white lyre-shaped pattern; the abdomen is banded with silvery-white stripes and the six-jointed legs are striped alternately with black and pure white. Among mosquitoes Stegomyia is the height of elegance. ~ David McCullough

My body is very shaped, and I like to be simple. I don't like to use so many colors. My best colors are black, white and blue. ~ Monica Bellucci