Quotes About Viruses

#1. Their numbers swell like viruses until they madden someone with a large army.

Kevin Hearne

#2. To get a human through a life, lives of broken bones, knock-me-over-with-a-feather susceptibility to myriad viruses, and whatever else might befall someone will cost money.

Henry Rollins

#3. Science ha seradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.

Richard Dawkins

#4. The Internet browser is the most susceptible to viruses. The browser is naive about downloading and executing software. Google is trying to help by releasing the Chrome browser as open source.

Vint Cerf

#5. Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.

Steven Johnson

#6. I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.

Vint Cerf

#7. When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.

Richard Preston

#8. The streets were more empty than usual - everyone who had someone was probably at home, cuddling them up, waiting for the bombs to fall or the shooting to start or the diseases to spread or just for the chips in their heads to catch viruses, melt, and drip out of their brains.

Mary Anne Mohanraj

#9. In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.

Martin Rees

#10. Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.

David Quammen

#11. What's the right way to think about the distribution part of Steam? You need to worry about viruses and people trying to publish other people's content, but the underlying thing is to eliminate that barrier between people who create stuff and people who want to have access to it.

Gabe Newell

#12. I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.

Kevin Mitnick

#13. The way that worms and viruses spread on the Internet is not that different from the way they spread in the real world, and the way you quarantine them is not that different, either.

David Ulevitch

#14. Modern cyberspace is a deadly festering swamp, teeming with dangerous programs such as 'viruses,' 'worms,' 'Trojan horses' and 'licensed Microsoft software' that can take over your computer and render it useless.

Dave Barry

#15. The oceans cover 65% of the globe's surface and, as there are up to 10 billion viruses per one litre of sea water, the whole ocean contains around 4 x 10 30 - enough, when laid side by side, to span 10 million light years.

Dorothy H. Crawford

#16. The features of globalization have huge consequences on pandemics. It just connects us so much more closely ... And as a consequence, every one of these viruses that passes from animals to humans has the capacity to infect all of us.

Nathan Wolfe

#17. If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses.

Carl Zimmer

#18. He didn't just give you a pretty screen saver, ignoring all the viruses, porn and spyware on your hard drive. He wiped the whole hard drive out.

John Crowder

#19. But however secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, Protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will always lurk in the shadows ready to pounce when neglect, poverty, famine, or war lets down the defenses.

Hans Zinsser

#20. I am much more powerful today than the old programs and mind viruses that I absorbed in my childhood.

Wayne Dyer

#21. The only kinds of ways we have to deal with viruses are old school, so vaccines for example are very effective, but the first vaccines were invented in the 1700's, so we're talking about technology that is over 200 years-old.

Carl Zimmer

#22. games so widespread among the young distract them from dangerous activities like reading and thinking: games do away with those intolerable viruses called ideas. This

Guillaume Faye

#23. Beliefs can be dangerous viruses that can infect and affect a whole society, a country, and even a whole world.

Debasish Mridha

#24. ...sitting in David's armchair, contemplating the many books that lined his shelves, a thought occured to me. It was a very human thought; it surprised me, i checked myself for viruses.

Liz Moore

#25. NATURAL DOES NOT mean good, or safe, or healthy, or wholesome. It never did. In fact, legally, it means nothing at all. Mercury, lead, and asbestos are natural, and so are viruses, E. coli, and salmonella. A

Michael Specter

#26. Well, either way - peasant or pheasant - it tastes like chicken. My patients bring me gifts too. Things like gift cards ... and viruses.

Penny Reid

#27. We really depend on viruses for our complete survival.

Carl Zimmer

#28. Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet.

Laurie Garrett

#29. Viruses face four basic challenges: how to get from one host to another, how to penetrate a cell within that host, how to commandeer the cell's equipment and resources for producing multiple copies of itself, and how to get back out - out of the cell, out of the host, on to the next. A

David Quammen

#30. The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

E. O. Wilson

#31. The computer was the newest addition to the local library, and quickly had more viruses than the local whore house.

Giles Curtis

#32. It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid - usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.

Francis Crick

#33. To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.

Richard Dawkins

#34. The best prophylactic for god viruses, especially fundamentalist variants, is science education. The more science is taught or discussed, the fewer tools a god virus has to infect populations.

Darrel W. Ray

#35. People may have said that without symptoms, you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses.

Bruce Beutler

#36. She saw the children. They have been given viruses to educate them. From three weeks old they could speak and do basic arithmetic. By ten, they had been made adult, forced like flowers to bloom early. But they were not flowers of love. They were flowers of work, to be put to work. There was no time.

Geoff Ryman

#37. Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

Jill Lepore

#38. If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet - microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.

Nathan Wolfe

#39. The idea of creating glass art sculptures in the shapes of lethal viruses struck him as unsettling, original, and breathtakingly beautiful at the same time.

Joseph Souza

#40. Vaccines are little pieces of bacteria or viruses injected into the body to give the immune system an education. They work by ramping up your own defensive system so that you're ready to fight the bacteria or virus upon first contact, without becoming sick first.

Rene Fester Kratz

#41. Mushrooms have many helpful nutrients, including beta glucans for immune enhancement, ergothioneines for antioxidative potentiation, nerve growth stimulators for helping brain function, and antimicrobial compounds for limiting viruses.

Paul Stamets

#42. Prejudice will always exist. So will sickness and disease, but that scarcely seems sufficient reason for telling our medical scientists to put on their hats, close up their laboratories, and give the spirochetes, bacilli and viruses a free hand.

Margaret Halsey

#43. We have Borna virus genes. We're part Borna virus, which is weird, but apparently our cells and our genomes in a weird way might actually be grabbing these viruses, grabbing genetic material from the viruses that are infecting it and pulling them into their own genome.

Carl Zimmer

#44. If we are lucky, they were never retarded enough to create computer viruses and will have no such things as firewalls and security like we have. If they have never experienced a full blown computer failure we'll introduce them to the concept

Thomas Wilson

#45. I was upset, sad, angry - something! I needed to do something! I needed to feel myself, understand myself and this horrible world we are all trapped in, where bugs and tumors and viruses worm their way into our brains and lay their putrid eggs that hatch and eat us alive from the inside out.

Garth Stein

#46. Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving ... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.

Chris Crutcher

#47. If you don't understand viruses, phishing, and similar threats, you become more susceptible to them. If you don't know how social networks leak information that you thought was private, you're likely to reveal much more than you realize.

Brian Kernighan

#48. Disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods, oil spills and radioactive fallout cause massive death of people, pigs, bats and birds. These disasters also impact the immune health of survivors. All harbor viruses.

Paul Stamets

#49. Our brains are like computers; it's our responsibility to programme them well, daily, and remove the viruses.

Sam Owen

#50. Kids from small families grow about an inch taller than those from large families. This is true regardless of income and social class, because a body can't grow well while fighting off nine siblings' cold viruses.

Arianne Cohen

#51. Some viruses don't actually harm the system itself, but all of them cause network slowdowns due to the heavy network traffic caused by the virus replication

Chuck Easttom

#52. She took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really wasn't that much of a stretch

David Sedaris

#53. Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of

David Quammen

#54. Today's technology enables scientists to craft biological, DNA-based viruses that affect only one individual, thus forcing security and intelligence services around the world to both protect the DNA of their own leaders and gather the DNA and other markers of other countries' leaders.3

Pippa Malmgren

#55. There's very little that shocks me because I consider life a miracle so I guess what shocks me is that life exists. How the hell did we get here? What shocks me is that bacteria alter their genes and resist antibiotics and viruses resist vaccines.

Bernie Siegel

#56. Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.

Nancy Gibbs

#57. The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.

David Quammen

#58. A primary concern among Mac users, and a benefit to the hacking community, is the Mac owner mind-set that Macs aren't susceptible to viruses or attack. It is an interesting stance considering that the thing they are claiming to be naturally impervious from attack is, well, a computer!

Sean-Philip Oriyano

#59. The other naturally occurring viruses, like ebola, are not durable enough to generate a runaway epidemic.

Martin J. Rees

#60. The oceans are thought to contain of the order of 4x1030 viruses, equivalent in mass to 75 million blue whales.

Franklin M. Harold

#61. [Physicists] feel that the field of bacterial viruses is a fine playground for serious children who ask ambitious questions.

Max Delbruck

#62. We need not seek our own best selves, and in the meantime we inoculate ourselves against the viruses of age and idealism, which, as the advertising agencies well know, depress sales and sour the feasts of consumption.

Lewis H. Lapham

#63. Our guide wears a helmet of dyed brown curls and a shield of large yellow daisies plastered onto a black sweatshirt. She frowns us into the Special Ed room. "Visitors are viruses," Tessy warns. "They cause fevers." She fires two visitor's passes our way. "Clip these on.

Tower Lowe

#64. DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins.

Richard J. Roberts

#65. The modern diet is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived immunity-building compounds which makes us highly vulnerable to viruses, infections and disease.

Joel Fuhrman

#66. Maybe I should mention it: I was not from the beginning mainly interested in papilloma virus; I was mainly interested in infectious agents in human cancer. So papilloma viruses came up as the most likely candidate from my viewpoint.

Harald Zur Hausen

#67. We've already seen digital picture frames pre-loaded with viruses; I'm not eager to have my refrigerator hacked or my alarm clock turned against me.

Jamais Cascio

#68. For the first time in history we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real time. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour.

Margaret Chan

#69. When it comes to taking genes from viruses and bacteria and putting them into plants, people say 'Yuck! Why would scientists do that?' Because sometimes it is the safest, cheapest and most effective technology to advance sustainable agriculture and enhance food security.

Pamela Ronald

#70. Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. ... Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants speed.

Erik Naggum

#71. From some dilatory reading in the early 1960s, I knew enough about viruses and their association with tumors in animals to understand that they might provide a relatively simple entry into a problem as complex as cancer.

Harold E. Varmus

#72. General Fatigue stalked in, & a Major-General,
Captain Fatigue, and at the base of all
pale Corporal Fatigue,
and curious microbes came, came viruses:
and the Court conferred on Henry, and conferred on Henry
the rare Order of Weak.

John Berryman

#73. What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

John Updike

#74. One of the big challenges now is to figure out just how many viruses there really are in the human genome. So far the estimate is 8.3% of our genome is virus, but it actually could be a lot higher.

Carl Zimmer

#75. In view of all the deadly computer viruses that have been spreading lately, Weekend Update would like to remind you: when you link up to another computer, you're linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to.

Dennis Miller

#76. Unidentified flying objects, abominable snowmen, the Loch Ness monster and human cancer viruses. - Medical World News, 1974, on four "mysteries" widely reported and publicized but never seen

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#77. In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.

Marshall McLuhan

#78. In terms of dangers, such as viruses, fraud or identity theft, I don't think we were thinking about that at all when we got started. If we had been worried about that, the net might have been better today, but we might not have even got there.

Bob Kahn

#79. We may be sucking in all sorts of viruses and we really don't know the full range of them. Maybe we've got flu virus inside of us. That's a possibility. Maybe we're part flu.

Carl Zimmer

#80. A hundred million crystallized polio viruses could cover the period at the end of this sentence. There could be two hundred and fifty Woodstock Festivals of viruses sitting on that period-the combined populations of Great Britain and France-and you would never know it.

Anonymous

#81. Although cancer is not universally caused by viruses, certain viruses cause particular cancers, such as the human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#82. Life is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#83. When the AIDS epidemic broke, because I happened to be a science nerd and knew a lot about viruses and a lot about that virus at the time, I felt a moral obligation to go out and try to stem the fear and get out and explain to people what the disease was and how it worked.

Morgan Fairchild

#84. Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.

Richard Dawkins

#85. Islam has some of the best defenses against other god viruses and has the potential to be more parasitically aggressive when consolidating political power with a society.

Darrel Ray

#86. How very American, he thought, to look at a disease as homosexual or heterosexual, as if viruses had the intelligence to choose between different inclinations of human behavior.

Randy Shilts

#87. Our examination of computer viruses leads us to the conclusion that they are very close to what we might define as "artificial life." Rather than representing a scientific achievement, this probably represents a flaw in our definition.

Gene Spafford

#88. What are called viruses are always dead and incapable of any acts whatsoever. Dead matter may be acted upon but never acts of itself.

T.C. Fry

#89. People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We're all in this together.

David Quammen

#90. A strong feeling of adventure is animating those who are working on bacterial viruses, a feeling that they have a small part in the great drive towards a fundamental problem in biology.

Max Delbruck

#91. Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.

Yuval Noah Harari

#92. The problem of viruses is temporary and will be solved in two years.

John McAfee

#93. Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.

Jean Baudrillard

#94. Bacteria and viruses were the most effective allies.

Eduardo Galeano

#95. Not all diseases come from bacteria and viruses, Professor. The worst often come from things you cannot see under a microscope. This plant is infested with an aggressive strain of such invisible germs.

Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

#96. Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.

Arthur C. Clarke

#97. Over millions of years the viruses in our genome mutate more and more so the look less and less and less recognizable as viruses and so if there was a virus that infected our pre mammal ancestors like 250 million years ago, which it probably did, we can't see it because it just looks totally random.

Carl Zimmer

#98. For many years, the proposed influenza epicenter has been thought to be Southeast Asia. Farming practices there bring pigs, fowl, and people into close contact, allowing swine, avian, and human flu viruses to mix. The cycle is thought to be birds to pigs to humans.

Elizabeth T. Murane

#99. If Charles Darwin reappeared today, he might be surprised to learn that humans are descended from viruses as well as from apes.

Robin A. Weiss

#100. The reason that viruses are so hard to fight, the reason for example we need a flu virus every year is that they evolve very fast.

Carl Zimmer