Viruses Quotes

Doubt is a virus that attacks our self-esteem, productivity and confidence. Faith that you and your life are perfectly unfolding is the strongest vaccine. ~ Sean Stephenson

I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called 'Angels in America.' I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it. ~ Tony Kushner

Maybe I should mention it: I was not from the beginning mainly interested in papilloma virus; I was mainly interested in infectious agents in human cancer. So papilloma viruses came up as the most likely candidate from my viewpoint. ~ Harald Zur Hausen

I also become the local computer nerd. The administration brings me in to fix all the computers, I create viruses to invade at a specific day and time. They call me in, and I eradicate my own virus, only to plant another one to go into effect a couple months later. They ask me why I can't just fix the computers once and for all. I tell them to quit going to porn sites and it will stay fixed. That shuts them up every time. ~ Darynda Jones

People may have said that without symptoms, you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses. ~ Bruce Beutler

Brain-like in function and speed, the internet connected over one-third of the global population. Three million searches every minute; one-hundred-trillion emails every year; more Facebook users than people in North America, all with with personal photos, videos, apps, and chats. There were dozens of dating sites, an immersive universe called 2nd Life that boasted a country-sized GDP, a slew of viruses, obnoxious advertising, more than a billion photos of naked women, and seventy-two hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. This was the environment where the friendship flourished. ~ Jake Vander Ark

When you put someone on therapy, you lower the level of virus such that it makes it very difficult for them to infect others. ~ Anthony S. Fauci

Nita stood there horrified. "You just killed him!"
"No," the Lone One said, "you did. Not a bad start, but then you were intent enough on killing something."
All around Nita, the snarling of the viruses was getting louder and louder. "Anyway, don't be too concerned about Pralaya; I'll find another of his people to replace him if there's need. Now, though, matters stand as I told you they stood. All we need is your conscious answer to the question. Can we do business?"
Nita stood there, frozen.
And another voice spoke out of the darkness.
"Fairest and Fallen," Kit said, "one more time ... greeting and defiance. ~ Diane Duane

Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet. ~ Laurie Garrett

Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether it's bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals. "All of nature is a conjugation of the verb 'to eat,'" in the words of William Ralph Inge. ~ Lierre Keith

The virus-to-cancer connection is where medicinal mushrooms offer unique opportunities for medical research. ~ Paul Stamets

Researchers studying emerging viruses have noticed an interesting phenomenon. As more human beings are born, there is a consistent spread of human habitation into once undeveloped ecoranges. The previously existing environment is removed, houses are built, people move in. The former populations of plants and animals are displaced. However, one of the major things that has been overlooked is that viruses have also lived in those regions for a very long time - in a healthy symbiotic balance with their hosts, both plant and animal. It is possible to think of them as an invisible herd or pack species, spread with the same kind of density throughout those ecoranges just as deer or birds are. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner

The only kinds of ways we have to deal with viruses are old school, so vaccines for example are very effective, but the first vaccines were invented in the 1700's, so we're talking about technology that is over 200 years-old. ~ Carl Zimmer

Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The concern scientists had regarding passenger viruses was not unfounded. You may recall the disastrous SV40 monkey virus which contaminated the polio vaccines. There are scientists who claim this virus is the cause of multiple human cancers. On CDC's website a page on vaccine safety, which was suddenly removed (archived copies exist), states that: "SV40 virus has been found in certain types of cancer in humans, but it has not been determined that SV40 causes these cancers. ~ James Morcan

If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet - microorganisms like bacteria and viruses. ~ Nathan Wolfe

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect. ~ Emile M. Cioran

We've already seen digital picture frames pre-loaded with viruses; I'm not eager to have my refrigerator hacked or my alarm clock turned against me. ~ Jamais Cascio

Humanity is just a virus with shoes. ~ Bill Hicks

Would the end be brutish and short? Or would it be long and drawn out? People dying slowly of every illness under the sun. From viruses that seeped from under jungle rocks. From infections received while making love. From fratricide. Genocide. Hatred that intensified over decades, centuries, until nothing could stop its rolling over and flattening entire peoples, races, continents. Would the passion and joy of future generations be expressed in acts of hate, as acts of "sex" were now routinely expressed in acts of violence? ~ Alice Walker

About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself. ~ Carl Zimmer

People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We're all in this together. ~ David Quammen

Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent. ~ Jean Baudrillard

He stood up, rushed to the fanned-out glossy company brochures. His finger landed on one in the center. Three stylized gold crowns. Corona Labs - BRINGING THE FUTURE TODAY.
"This," he said, finger tapping. Each time he touched the paper it seemed to get warmer.
This turned out to be the brochure for a new company.
Catherine picked it up, showed it to her husband. "I thought I knew more or less all the research labs in the country, but this is a new one." Mac turned the glossy paper over in his big hands. There was a videolette loop embedded in the paper, all the rage nowadays. Some smiling woman in a lab coat endlessly raising a test tube in triumph, putting it down, raising it . . .
Nick was shaking with tension. The logo, the name Corona Laboratories meant nothing to him, but still they shone in his mind. ~ Lisa Marie Rice

If the structure that serves as a template (the gene or virus molecule) consists of, say, two parts, which are themselves complementary In structure, then each of these parts can serve as the mould for the production of a replica of the other part, and the complex of two complementary parts thus can serve as the mould for the production of duplicates of itself. ~ Linus Pauling

As life forms, viruses are just inherently interesting. It's the microworld - this universe of life too small for us to see - but it's profoundly complicated, and immensely powerful. Ebola is like a beautiful and frightening predator. There is a wonder in the operations of nature that can't be denied, even when we're the losers. ~ Richard Preston

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

For the first time in history we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real time. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour. ~ Margaret Chan

He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult to
understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?"
"This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed,
his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms."
"I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, and
so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is a
metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process. This whole myth
stinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because they
probably had no concept of pure water -- it was all brown and muddy and full of
viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier of
information -- both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water --
his semen, his data, his me -- flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it
to flourish."
"As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major rivers,
the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from -- they took
it directly from the riverbeds."
"So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information -- clay.
They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out -- got rid of the water. If
water got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they baked it and
drove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat, t ~ Neal Stephenson

Computer viruses are alive. ~ Stephen Hawking

The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it's designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

We torture and kill two billion sentient living beings every week. 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this, a biologist would consider them a virus. ~ Philip Wollen

Viruses don't just happen; people write them deliberately. ~ Peter H. Gregory

A healthy body is not easily infected by external bacteria and viruses, a healthy mind too is not easily infected by external insults and undesirable events. ~ Awdhesh Singh

If everyone catches the cold virus it just ... might make you fall into Onew Condition for a while! ~ Onew

There are many different causes of the scarring. Viruses are common. Hepatitis B, hepatitis C, what we call autoimmune diseases where the body attacks the liver itself such as primary biliary cirrhosis is an autoimmune disease; sclerosing cholangitis is an autoimmune disease; and so those diseases where the liver is being destroyed by either the virus or an autoimmune disease, it can only scar, and why it doesn't regenerate has to do with the fact that there is this ongoing scar tissue that blocks that regeneration. ~ John Roberts

Islam has some of the best defenses against other god viruses and has the potential to be more parasitically aggressive when consolidating political power with a society. ~ Darrel Ray

In the early '70s, the nation was afflicted with incurable pattern viruses - small microbes that reproduced and multiplied from a single swatch left on a sofa, and soon covered an entire room. ~ James Lileks

If there is delay in getting culling teams out, delay in any part of the chain, even weeks, that could have great implications for the virus to spread. ~ David Nabarro

The reason that viruses are so hard to fight, the reason for example we need a flu virus every year is that they evolve very fast. ~ Carl Zimmer

The nucleic acids, as constituents of living organisms, are comparable In importance to proteins. There is evidence that they are Involved In the processes of cell division and growth, that they participate In the transmission of hereditary characters, and that they are important constituents of viruses. An understanding of the molecular structure of the nucleic acids should be of value In the effort to understand the fundamental phenomena of life. ~ Linus Pauling

Their numbers swell like viruses until they madden someone with a large army. ~ Kevin Hearne

We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty - influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns. ~ Nathan Wolfe

How to spell Aedes aegypti,the world's one-stop, viral-disease-transmitting mosquito: T-R-O-U-B-L-E. ~ T.K. Naliaka

Today's technology enables scientists to craft biological, DNA-based viruses that affect only one individual, thus forcing security and intelligence services around the world to both protect the DNA of their own leaders and gather the DNA and other markers of other countries' leaders.3 ~ Pippa Malmgren

Unidentified flying objects, abominable snowmen, the Loch Ness monster and human cancer viruses. - Medical World News, 1974, on four "mysteries" widely reported and publicized but never seen ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I have caught more ills from people sneezing over me and giving me virus infections than from kissing dogs. ~ Barbara Woodhouse

From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They are not infections, but infarctions; they do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an excess of positivity. Therefore, they elude all technologies and techniques that seek to combat what is alien. ~ Byung-Chul Han

As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. ~ Seth Berkley

Viruses face four basic challenges: how to get from one host to another, how to penetrate a cell within that host, how to commandeer the cell's equipment and resources for producing multiple copies of itself, and how to get back out - out of the cell, out of the host, on to the next. A ~ David Quammen

If you don't understand viruses, phishing, and similar threats, you become more susceptible to them. If you don't know how social networks leak information that you thought was private, you're likely to reveal much more than you realize. ~ Brian Kernighan

With 30,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations from the seasonal flu, those numbers are certainly higher than what we've seen of the swine flu. Protecting yourself from both viruses is very important. ~ Kristi Yamaguchi

The best prophylactic for god viruses, especially fundamentalist variants, is science education. The more science is taught or discussed, the fewer tools a god virus has to infect populations. ~ Darrel W. Ray

Excessive chemicals eventually inhibit your immune system (the defence against infections and illnesses) making you vulnerable to viruses of every shape and size. They will lower the production of serotonin (making you feel listless and joyless as in depression) and can eventually, if they remain virulent, cause heart disease, hardening of the arteries, type 2 diabetes and certain cancers. Inadvertently stress will destroy you both mentally and physically unless you change the way you think about it and relate to it. With ~ Ruby Wax

I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose – you didn't know that, did you, Poke?…He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it's a good name and it means 'spirit,' and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong." She laughs, rough as a cough. "The queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile. ~ Timothy Hallinan

I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot. ~ Vint Cerf

We worried for decades about WMDs – Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now it is time to worry about a new kind of WMDs – Weapons of Mass Disruption. ~ John Mariotti

It is encrusted with history. Embedded within it are peculiar fragments of DNA-some derived from ancient viruses-that were inserted into the genome in the distant past and have been carried passively for millennia since then. Some of these fragments were once capable of actively "jumping" between genes and organisms, but they have now been largely inactivated and silenced. Like decommissioned traveling salesmen, these pieces are permanently tethered to our genome, unable to move or get out. These fragments are vastly more common than genes, resulting in yet another major idiosyncrasy of our genome: much of the human genome is not particularly human. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The idea of creating glass art sculptures in the shapes of lethal viruses struck him as unsettling, original, and breathtakingly beautiful at the same time. ~ Joseph Souza

Some viruses don't actually harm the system itself, but all of them cause network slowdowns due to the heavy network traffic caused by the virus replication ~ Chuck Easttom

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human. ~ Michael Specter

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. ~ Jonas Salk

One is faced with a dilemma: If one places total trust in all other users, one is vulnerable to the antisocial behavior of any malicious user consider the case of viruses. But if one tries to be totally reclusive and isolated, one is not only bored, but one's information universe will cease to grow and be enhanced by interaction with others. The result is that most of us operate in a complicated trade-off zone with various arrangements of trust and security mechanisms. ~ Fernando J. Corbato

HIV/AIDS from converted from a lethal disease into a chronic disease because basic scientists' fundamental research was done that illuminated aspects of that virus and allowed the generation of therapies like antiretroviral therapies. And so now HIV/AIDS is not a lethal disease, it is a chronic disease. ~ Laurie Glimcher

The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

Any virus that's been sequenced today - that genome can be made. ~ Craig Venter

When you get sick with the flu you get infected with flu viruses and they make lots of new flu viruses, but those new viruses are not exact copies of the old ones. They have mutations in them. A lot of those mutations are harmful. ~ Carl Zimmer

The wilderness is not a landscape you visit; it is all around you, wherever you are. We persuade ourselves that our taming of the world is profound, we lay water mains and sewers and read thousand year old books, we drive our autobahns through solid rock, we huddle together in caves lit by the incandescence of television screens. We do everything we can to be safe, and still the planet spins, the winds roar, the great ice caps creak and heave, the continental plates shudder and bring cities crashing to the ground, the viruses infect us and the oceans toy with us, lapping against the edges of our precarious land. We are in the midst of wilderness, even curled up with our lovers in bed. ~ Paul Shepheard

The idea of the live-virus vaccine is to produce in a continuous way some viral antigens. ~ Luc Montagnier

Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. ~ William S. Burroughs

The launch of phase 1 Ebola vaccine studies is a first step in developing a vaccine that could be licensed and used in the field to protect not only the front line health care workers but also those living in areas where Ebola virus exists. ~ Anthony Fauci

We have Borna virus genes. We're part Borna virus, which is weird, but apparently our cells and our genomes in a weird way might actually be grabbing these viruses, grabbing genetic material from the viruses that are infecting it and pulling them into their own genome. ~ Carl Zimmer

If we say that religion is a virus, then why isn't science a virus? ~ Richard Dawkins

Fear, left unchecked, can spread like a virus. ~ Lish McBride

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

There is nothing - no program, no hobby, no vice, no crime - that does not 'create jobs'. Tsunamis, computer viruses and shooting convenience store clerks all 'create jobs'. So that claim misses the plot; it applies to all so is an argument in favor of none. Instead of an argument on the merits, it is an admission that one has no such arguments. ~ Chris Horner

Vaccines are little pieces of bacteria or viruses injected into the body to give the immune system an education. They work by ramping up your own defensive system so that you're ready to fight the bacteria or virus upon first contact, without becoming sick first. ~ Rene Fester Kratz

The computer was the newest addition to the local library, and quickly had more viruses than the local whore house. ~ Giles Curtis

When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying. ~ Richard Preston

If ideas were viruses, then, like any virus, they would mutate rapidly and often arbitrarily, with only the fitter ideas spreading and continuing their lineage. We simply do not see this with any sort of knowledge. The only time knowledge might appear to mutate is when ideas are altered by the individuals holding them, but that does not prove the meme "hypothesis." In fact, if the meme "hypothesis" were true, then the evolution of ideas would be quite strange indeed. For every time a good idea was received through memetic transmission, there would be mutations of that idea, rapid one's, most of which would be complete nonsense. Sure, the nonsense ideas would "die", but they would appear at first and remain until they did. One might argue that this is made manifest in discursive thought, but one would be patently, at the base level, incorrect. This is, unfortunately, is one of the logical consequences of the meme "hypothesis" that, as a parasite, all information becomes discursive thought. Schizophrenics are typically the only people to experience discursive thoughts, and most people are not, in fact, schizophrenic. ~ Idav Kelly

The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us.

Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral met ~ Michael G. Cordingley

Those who become incoculated with the virus of race hatred are more unfortunate than the victim of it. Race hatred is the most malignant poison that can afflict the mind. It freezes up the fount of inspiration and chills the higher faculties of the soul. ~ Kelly Miller

Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.
So the universe wants to kill us all. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses. ~ Carl Zimmer

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny. ~ Nancy Gibbs

It turns out that viruses evolve from each other, like everything else. So if you look at the evolutionary tree of viruses, you can find parts of their genome that haven't changed over evolutionary time. You can recognize what may be a new virus by identifying this little piece of their genome that hasn't changed and is represented on the chip. ~ Joseph DeRisi

Over the past few days I have been fighting off a virus that has affected the majority of my band and crew. ~ Mika.

Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving ... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive. ~ Chris Crutcher

Beliefs can be dangerous viruses that can infect and affect a whole society, a country, and even a whole world. ~ Debasish Mridha

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal. ~ David Quammen

Because the thing about viruses is that they're easily manipulated. The DNA they inject doesn't have to be destructive. It can be replaced with almost any kind of DNA you want, and it can be programmed to only replace certain parts of the host's genetic code. In other words, viruses are perfect vectors for genetic engineering. ~ Christian Cantrell

For many years, the proposed influenza epicenter has been thought to be Southeast Asia. Farming practices there bring pigs, fowl, and people into close contact, allowing swine, avian, and human flu viruses to mix. The cycle is thought to be birds to pigs to humans. ~ Elizabeth T. Murane

Avoid activities outdoor.If you like to take an afternoon nap sleep under bed net. So these are measures that can be done to minimize [the] chance of infection [with Zika virus]. ~ Margaret Chan

Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end. ~ Henry Miller

We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. ~ David Graeber

In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they're grown from seed, and sex is nature's way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests' sight - unless, that is, people come to the tree's rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry. ~ Michael Pollan

Language is a virus, money is a nasty disease. ~ Jonathan Barnbrook

Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer. ~ Steven Johnson

Fundamental Christianity and Islam are diseases. They are viruses that have infected our species, and I see no reason to cease my broad-brushed punditry against them, their toxic beliefs and their dangerous doctrines. ~ Al Stefanelli

Columbus and his men, they say, Conveyed the virus hither Whereby my features rot away And vital powers wither; Yet had they not traversed the seas And come infected back, Why, think of all the luxuries That modern life would lack. ~ Richard Wilbur