Rene Dubos Quotes
Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.
To ward off disease or recover health, people as a rule find it easier to depend on healers than to attempt the more difficult task of living wisely.
Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.
The very process of living is a continual interplay between the individual and his environment, often taking the form of a struggle resulting in injury or disease.
Each civilization has its own kind of pestilence and can control it only by reforming itself.
There is an unbroken continuum from the wisdom of the body to the wisdom of the mind, from the wisdom of the individual to the wisdom of the race.
The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.
Man could escape danger only by renouncing adventure, by abandoning that which has given to the human condition its unique character and genius among the rest of living things.
Eradication of microbial disease is a will-o'-the-wisp; pursuing it leads into a morass of hazy biological concepts and half truths.
The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturæ—the most healing power of nature—are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating.
There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.
The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is probably the ultimate expression of human conceit, but it has deep roots in the past and is almost universal.
Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively.
Think globally, act locally": "Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.
Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.
Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.
A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity.
Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!
Biologically, man is still the great amateur of the animal kingdom; he is unique in his lack of anatomical and physiological specialization.
... each type of civilization has had diseases peculiar to it and at each period the various social groups in any community also have differed in this regard.
Human life is now molded to a large extent by the changes that man has brought about in his external environment and by his attempts at controlling body and soul.
Social evolution may be the result of intention, but it rarely, if ever, produces the result intended.
Whatever his inhibitions and tastes, Western man believes in the natural holiness of seminudism and raw vegetable juice, because these have become for him symbols of unadultered nature.
One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration.
With reference to life there is not one nature; there are only associations of states and circumstances, varying from place to place and from time to time.
... men as a rule are more preoccupied with the dangers that threaten their life than interested in the biological forces on which they depend for a constructive existence.
...Search for the cause may be a hopeless pursuit because most disease states are the indirect outcome of a constellation of circumstances.