Microbe Quotes
We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.
Fred Hoyle
We Dadaists are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent... There is no logic... The acts of life have no beginning and no end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada. Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes me as a boring kind of game... Like everything in life, Dada is useless... Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all of the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
Tristan Tzara
If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?...
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective - who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled - can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. ... The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache ... This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
Stanley Kubrick
White blood cells and other cells of ours actively seek out and kill foreign microbes. The specific antibodies that we gradually build up against a particular microbe infecting us make us less likely to get reinfected once we become cured. As we all know from experience, there are some illnesses, such as flu and the common cold, to which our resistance is only temporary; we can eventually contract the illness again. Against other illnesses, though-including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox - our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity. That's the principle of vaccination: to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe.
Jared Diamond
The concept of the « struggle for existence » has been applied to microbial interrelationships in nature in a manner comparable to the effects assigned by Darwin to higher forms of life. It has also been suggested that the ability of a microbe to produce an antibiotic substance enables it to survive Giom. in competition for space and for nutrients with other microbes. Such assumptions ppear to be totally unjustified on the basis of existing knowledge. Before we proceed with a discussion of the formation and activities of antibiotics under natural conditions, we must consider certain fundamental aspects of the problem of antibiotic production under controlled laboratory or factory conditions... All the discussion of a "struggle for existence" in which antibiotics are supposed to play a part, is merely a figment of the imagination, and an appeal to the melodramatic rather than the factual.
Selman Waksman
There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus... the only planets that we've landed on-are utterly lifeless. ...in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable.
Carl Sagan
You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach three and a half billion years ago. You are the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance, and natural forces. You are a mere grab-bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a universe. You are a purely biological entity, different only in degree but not in kind from a microbe, virus, or amoeba. You have no essence beyond your body, and at death you will cease to exist entirely. In short you come from nothing and are going to nowhere.
Randy Alcorn
The nature of a protective immune response to HIV is still unclear. Because in a very, very unique manner, unlike virtually any other microbe with which we're familiar, the HIV virus has evolved in a way that the immune system finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with the virus.
Anthony Fauci
If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
C. S. Lewis
The world was sick, and the ills from which it was suffering were mainly due to the perversion of man, his inability to live at peace with himself. The microbe was no longer the main enemy; science was sufficiently advanced to be able to cope with it admirably. If it were not for such barriers as superstition, ignorance, religious intolerance, misery and poverty.
Brock Chisholm