#oct

Even doctors — or perhaps especially doctors — need to be touched by something personally to understand the suffering of others. We’ve been taught about the enormous power over life and death that is invested in us; we can be deluded into thinking we are almighty. Almost instinctively we view death, incurable disease and disability as challenging our power. We forget that this is all part of life. I guess that we have to defend ourselves against the human suffering that confronts us every day, otherwise we’d quickly go under. Medical jargon helps keep us remote, yet seeing colleagues suffer is hard. If we think too much, we realise that we – and our loved ones – are just as vulnerable as the rest of humanity. ↗

— Jane Wilson-Howarth

#medical-jargon #death

Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#death #doctors #raven #death

Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears. ↗

— Criss Jami

#broken-hearts #comforting #crying #doctor #father

Exhausted after a full day of treating patients, William Carlos Williams angrily answered the phone. “Doctor,” said a woman’s voice, “my child has swallowed a mouse.” “Then get him to swallow a cat,” he replied, and slammed down the receiver. ↗

— Ross Wetzsteon

#williamcarloswilliams #dreams

How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#gay-men #homosexuality #lesbians #nocturnal-emissions #dreams

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#ignorance #indoctrination #education

The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#indoctrination #education

This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they ‘true believers’, driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive? ↗

— Naomi Klein

#economics #free-market-ideology #milton-friedman #shock-doctrine #faith

The peculiarity of the Christian faith is not to teach this doctrine but to render it, in various ways, more tolerable. Christianity teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been accomplished for us--that a master's hand is holding ours as we attempt to trace the difficult letters and that our script need only be a 'copy,' not an original. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#doctrine #faith #faith

The Doctor: Amazing. Nancy: What is? The Doctor: 1941. Right now, not very far from here, the German war machine is rolling up the map of Europe. Country after country, falling like dominoes. Nothing can stop it, nothing. Until one tiny, damp little island says "No. No, not here." A mouse in front of a lion. You're amazing, the lot of you. I don't know what you do to Hitler, but you frighten the hell out of me. ↗

— Steven Moffat

#hitler #humanity #who #ww #human-rights