“It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.”

“The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn't exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often) is like arguing that seat belts and air bags protect us from car crashes that were fatal to our prehistoric ancestors.”

“[T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis.”

“It appears that the epidemic of active disengagement we see in workplaces every day could be a curable disease…if we can help the people around us develop their strengths.”

“But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics.”

“Disease Carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.”