29 Quotes by John M. Barry

It is so much easier to believe than to think; it is astounding how much more believing is done than thinking.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the physician father of the Supreme Court justice, was not much overstating when he declared, “I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind – and all the worse for the fishes.

Epidemiologists have computed that measles requires an unvaccinated population of at least half a million people living in fairly close contact to continue to exist.

The fear, not the disease, threatened to break the society apart.

Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years.

He advised, “Whenever you fall, pick up something.

In the United States, no government, institution, or philanthropist even began to approach a similar level of support. As the Hopkins medical school was opening, American theological schools enjoyed endowments of $18 million, while medical school endowments totaled $500,000.

Huxley did not look the warrior. But he had a warrior’s ruthlessness. His dicta included the pronouncement: “The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.

Williams created the first government in the world which broke church and state apart. Because those who had linked the two believed that political authority came from God, this led to a fission whose fallout included the new and equally explosive concept that the state derives its authority from and remains subject to its citizens.