Quotes from Herbert M. Shelton

General Motors, General Mills, General Foods, general ignorance, general apathy, and general cussedness elect presidents and Congressmen and maintain them in power.

Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.

Life should be built on the conservation of energy.

Health and disease are the same thing—vital action intended to preserve, maintain, and protect the body. There is no more reason for treating disease than there is for treating health.

Old age is not a time of life. It is a condition of the body. It is not time that ages the body, it is abuse that does.

There is not a single argument nor a single fact that can be offered in favour of flesh eating that cannot be offered, with equal strength, in favour of cannibalism.

The intelligent person, viewing the great number of so-called diseases that arise out of this prostration of the functions of life, and realising that they have one and all grown out of the habitual violations of the laws of life, will recognise at once that the first step in the restoration of health needs must be to make amends at once by the unconditional return to the simplicity and perfect obedience to the laws that have been so perseveringly violated.

The effort to cure disease has been, without doubt, the greatest curse that has ever been perpetrated upon the human race. The idea that disease is something that must be cured, the idea that it is something that can be cured, must be eradicated from the human mind before we can hope to arrive at a rational solution of our health problems.

An intelligent person may be wrong sometimes, but a fool is never wrong. The medical profession is never wrong.

Although man has included meat in his diet for thousands of years, his anatomy and physiology, and the chemistry of his digestive juices, are still unmistakably those of a frugivorous animal.

Food-addiction, or food-drunkenness, is an old story in Hygienic literature. This is the first mention I have seen of it in "regular" medical literature. I fear to hope that its recognition spells progress.

It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.

Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.

Cutting out bad habits is far more effective than cutting out organs.

You don't need treatment. The fever, inflammation, coughing, etc., constitute the healing process. Just get out of their way and permit them to complete their work. Don't try to 'aid' nature. She doesn't need your puny aid—she only asks that you cease interfering.

You are free to choose your own way of life, but you are not free to choose the results.

Health and disease are the same thing—vital action intended to preserve, maintain, and protect the body. There is no more reason for treating disease than there is for treating health.

What the sick need is teachers not treaters, health schools not hospitals, instruction not treatment, education in right living not training the sick habit. Both they and their advisors must get rid of the curing idea and the practices built up thereon.

Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant as the turning of the earth on its axis. Man can neither duplicate nor imitate nor provide a substitute for the process. All schools of healing are frauds.

The so-called symptoms of disease are manifestations of an inherent principle of the organism to restore healthy function and to resist offending agents and influences.

In a fast, the body tears down its defective parts and then builds anew when eating is resumed.

Although man has included meat in his diet for thousands of years, his anatomy and physiology, and the chemistry of his digestive juices, are still unmistakably those of a frugivorous animal.

There are no healing agents.

To starve is to die; to fast is to live.