Quoted Writers & Scholars

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution... Science for its own sake usually means nothing more than science for the sake of the people who happen to be pursuing it. Knowledge which is unable to support action is not genuine – and how unsure is activity without understanding... If medicine is to fulfill her great task, then she must enter the political and social life... The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.”

         - Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902)

“He'd always questioned authority. Distrusted those above him.  Searched for a standard he didn't have to believe in because it was handed down, or inherited or imposed; but only and simply because it was the truth.  Now, to his surprise, he was beginning to suspect he didn't need someone else to tell him what was right.  That his own anchors, when the strain came, would hold against the storm wind.
 

He didn't feel wise.  He certainly didn't feel infallible.  But something had stood up in him that hadn't been there before.  He couldn't say what it was, or where it had come from.  Maybe just from being tested, and coming through, but in some mysterious way, he'd left the fear behind.”

       - David Poyer (1949 - ), The Command.

 “Now listen to what the son of a waiter has to tell you:  A really well-bred man never submits to the waiter’s tyranny, and among the waiters, of course, are some who think as well-bred people do.”

       - Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), Billiards at Half-past Nine

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

        - Edward Gibbon (1723–1792)