Quotes from John M. Barry

Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.

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.

You don't manage the truth. You tell the truth.

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.

In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. Life does not choose the logically best design to meet a new situation. It adapts what already exists...The result, unlike the clean straight lines of logic, is often irregular, messy.

The two most important questions in science are "What can I know?" and "How can I know it?

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

What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.

Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." He also believed that learning had purpose, stating, "The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

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.

Certainty creates strength. Certainty gives one something upon which to lean. Uncertainty creates weakness. Uncertainty makes one tentative if not fearful, and tentative steps, even when in the right direction, may not overcome significant obstacles.

Emerson said that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man

biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process.

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

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.

For the influenza pandemic that erupted in 1918 was the first great collision between nature and modern science. It was the first great collision between a natural force and a society that included individuals who refused either to submit to that force or to simply call upon divine intervention to save themselves from it, individuals who instead were determined to confront this force directly, with a developing technology and with their minds.

All positive knowledge obtained . . . has resulted from the accurate observation of facts.

It was a skill useful to lawyers, and no man in all English history was more the lawyer than Coke. He personified a profession considered both so influential and so dubious that in 1372 the House of Commons had tried to bar lawyers from Parliament; little had changed when, in Coke's lifetime, Shakespeare wrote, "First, kill all the lawyers.

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.

Meanwhile, Quakers used outrageous behavior to draw more attention to their beliefs and provoke a response. A Quaker man walked into a Boston church holding a bottle in each hand, then smashed them to the floor; he shouted, "Thus will the Lord break all to pieces!" A Quaker woman stripped herself naked and paraded through the Newbury church during worship. Another Quaker woman paraded nude through the streets of Boston.

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.

Newspapers reported on the disease with the same mixture of truth and half-truth, truth and distortion, truth and lies with which they reported everything else. And no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza.

But even after European medicine changed, medicine in the United States did not. In research and education especially, American medicine lagged far behind, and that made practice lag as well.

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