Cancer Quotes (61 quotes)
President Clinton at the Human Genome Announcement at the White House (20 Jun 2000), with Francis S. Collins (left) and Craig Ventner. (source)
A hot topic of late, expressed most notably in Bernie Siegel’s best-selling books, has emphasized the role of positive attitude in combating such serious diseases as cancer. From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom.
Almost all the world is natural chemicals, so it really makes you re-think everything. A cup of coffee is filled with chemicals. They've identified a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee. But we only found 22 that have been tested in animal cancer tests out of this thousand. And of those, 17 are carcinogens. There are ten milligrams of known carcinogens in a cup of coffee and thats more carcinogens than youre likely to get from pesticide residues for a year!
As agonizing a disease as cancer is, I do not think it can be said that our civilization is threatened by it. … But a very plausible case can be made that our civilization is fundamentally threatened by the lack of adequate fertility control. Exponential increases of population will dominate any arithmetic increases, even those brought about by heroic technological initiatives, in the availability of food and resources, as Malthus long ago realized.
By the year 2000 the commonest killers such as coronary heart disease, stroke, respiratory, diseases and many cancers will be wiped out.
Cancer cells invade surrounding tissue, make their way into blood vessels, and spread throughout the body. What are they searching for? My guess is oxygen.
Cancer is a biological, not a statistical problem.
Doctor Thomas …
Said, “Cancer’s a funny thing.
Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
It’s like some hidden assassin
Waiting to strike at you.
Childless women get it.
And men when they retire;
It’s as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire.”
Said, “Cancer’s a funny thing.
Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
It’s like some hidden assassin
Waiting to strike at you.
Childless women get it.
And men when they retire;
It’s as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire.”
Dust consisting of fine fibers of asbestos, which are insoluble and virtually indestructible, may become a public health problem in the near future. At a recent international conference on the biological effects of asbestos sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, participants pointed out on the one hand that workers exposed to asbestos dust are prone in later life to develop lung cancer, and on the other hand that the use of this family of fibrous silicate compounds has expanded enormously during the past few decades. A laboratory curiosity 100 years ago, asbestos today is a major component of building materials.
— Magazine
Even environmentalists seem more concerned about the loss of a year or so of life expectation through cancer than they are about the degradation of the natural world by deforestation or greenhouse gases—something that could cause the death of our grandchildren.
Ever so often in the history of human endeavour, there comes a breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier into a new era. ... today's announcement is such a breakthrough, a breakthrough that opens the way for massive advancement in the treatment of cancer and hereditary diseases. And that is only the beginning.
Excessive and prolonged use of tobacco, especially cigarettes, seems to be an important factor in the induction of bronchiogenic carcinoma. Among 605 men with bronchiogenic carcinoma, other than adenocarcinoma, 96.5 per cent were moderately heavy to chain smokers for many years, compared with 73.7 per cent among the general male hospital population without cancer. Among the cancer group 51.2 per cent were excessive or chain smokers compared to 19.1 per cent in the general hospital group without cancer.
[Co-author with Evarts Ambrose Graham]
[Co-author with Evarts Ambrose Graham]
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
How far do you go to preserve individual human life? … I mean, what are we to do with the NHS? How can you put a value in pounds, shillings and pence on an individual’s life? There was a case with a bowel cancer drug – if you gave that drug, which costs several thousand pounds, it continued life for six weeks on. How can you make that decision?
I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much.
I sometimes think there is a malign force loose in the universe that is the social equivalent of cancer, and it’s plastic. It infiltrates everything. It’s metastasis. It gets into every single pore of productive life. I mean there won’t be anything that isn’t made of plastic before long. They’ll be paving the roads with plastic before they’re done. Our bodies, our skeletons, will be replaced with plastic.
I waited for Rob and, linking arms, we took our final steps together onto the rooftop of the world. It was 8.15 am on 24 May 2004; there was nowhere higher on the planet that we could go, the world lay at our feet. Holding each other tightly, we tried to absorb where we were. To be standing here, together, exactly three years since Rob’s cancer treatment, was nothing short of a miracle. Standing on top of Everest was more than just climbing a mountain - it was a gift of life. With Pemba and Nawang we crowded together, wrapping our arms around each other. They had been more than Sherpas, they had been our guardian angels.
— Jo Gambi
I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
I would picture myself as a virus, or as a cancer cell, for example, and try to sense what it would be like to be either. I would also imagine myself as the immune system, and I would try to reconstruct what I would do as an immune system engaged in combating a virus or cancer cell. When I had played through a series of such scenarios on a particular problem and had acquired new insights, I would design laboratory experiments accordingly… Based upon the results of the experiment, I would then know what question to ask next… When I observed phenomena in the laboratory that I did not understand, I would also ask questions as if interrogating myself: “Why would I do that if I were a virus or a cancer cell, or the immune system?” Before long, this internal dialogue became second nature to me; I found that my mind worked this way all the time.
If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.
If a Schirrus by long standing, increasing, and motion of the adjacent Parts is thus moved, that the neighbouring Vessels around its edges begin to inflame, it’s become malignant, and from its likeness to a Crab, is now called a Cancer, or Carcinoma.
If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one, if judged by the evidence on hand.
A cautious statement indicating that evidence was, in 1954, beginning to point to the connection between lung cancer and smoking.
A cautious statement indicating that evidence was, in 1954, beginning to point to the connection between lung cancer and smoking.
If Louis Pasteur were to come out of his grave because he heard that the cure for cancer still had not been found, NIH would tell him, “Of course we'll give you assistance. Now write up exactly what you will be doing during the three years of your grant.” Pasteur would say, “Thank you very much,” and would go back to his grave. Why? Because research means going into the unknown. If you know what you are going to do in science, then you are stupid! This is like telling Michelangelo or Renoir that he must tell you in advance how many reds and how many blues he will buy, and exactly how he will put those colors together.
If you want to really understand about a tumor, you've got be be a tumor.
In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks.
It is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars. [Speaking on the Human Genome Project's progress.]
It was noted long ago that the front row of burlesque houses was occupied predominantly by bald-headed men. In fact, such a row became known as the bald-headed row. It might be assumed from this on statistical evidence that the continued close observation of chorus girls in tights caused loss of hair from the top of the head.
[Disputing a statistical study for the American Cancer Society showing smoking to be a cancer causative.]
[Disputing a statistical study for the American Cancer Society showing smoking to be a cancer causative.]
Many of us who conduct biomedical research do so with what could be described as a religious fervor. This would not have come as a surprise to Mary Lasker. She once told a reporter, “I am opposed to heart attacks and cancer the way one is opposed to sin.” Amen.
Men are not going to embrace eugenics. They are going to embrace the first likely, trim-figured girl with limpid eyes and flashing teeth who comes along, in spite of the fact that her germ plasm is probably reeking with hypertension, cancer, haemophilia, colour blindness, hay fever, epilepsy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
My final word, before I'm done,
Is “Cancer can be rather fun”—
Provided one confronts the tumour
with a sufficient sense of humour.
I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one's cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit.
Is “Cancer can be rather fun”—
Provided one confronts the tumour
with a sufficient sense of humour.
I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one's cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit.
My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.
Never to have seen anything but the temperate zone is to have lived on the fringe of the world. Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer live the majority of all the plant species, the vast majority of the insects, most of the strange ... quadrupeds, all of the great and most of the poisonous snakes and large lizards, most of the brilliantly colored sea fishes, and the strangest and most gorgeously plumaged of the birds.
No one thinks of concealing the truth from a cardiac patient: there is nothing shameful about a heart attack. Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene—in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.
On CBS Radio the news of [Ed Murrow’s] death, reportedly from lung cancer, was followed by a cigarette commercial.
One in ten plant species contains anticancer substances of variable potency, but relatively few have been bioassayed.
One of the great achievements of the 1950s and 1960s was a [TV] series called Your Life in Their Hands, which dealt with medical science. It presented the scientific evidence for the connection between tobacco and cancer, against the entrenched opposition, all of which you can quite easily imagine. … The “television doctor” … presented the evidence of the connection between the two over and over again on television. A lot of people tried to stop it, but he carried on. It ruined his career, I suspect, in the medical sense, but he stuck to his guns. It’s one of early television’s badges of honour.
Palliative care should be an integral part of cancer care and not be associated exclusively with terminal care. Many patients need it early in the course of their disease.
So, then, the Tincture of the Philosophers is a universal medicine, and consumes all diseases, by whatsoever name they are called, just like an invisible fire. The dose is very small, but its effect is most powerful. By means thereof I have cured the leprosy, venereal disease, dropsy, the falling sickness, colic, scab, and similar afflictions; also lupus, cancer, noli-metangere, fistulas, and the whole race of internal diseases, more surely than one could believe.
Statisticians tell us that for many years the death-rate from cancer has been slowly but steadily rising: and not unnaturally, many people conclude from this that for some reason or other we are becoming more susceptible to cancer. Actually, that conclusion does not follow at all. The rise in the cancer death-rate is probably due entirely to the fact that other causes of death have been reduced. Numbers of people who, if they had been born a century earlier, would have died in their twenties of typhoid or smallpox, say, are now living on into their seventies and dying of cancer.
The … publicity is always the same; only the blanks need to be filled in: “It was announced today by scientists at [Harvard, Vanderbilt, Stanford] Medical School that a gene responsible for [some, many, a common form of] [schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, arterio-sclerosis, prostate cancer] has been located and its DNA sequence determined. This exciting research, say scientists, is the first step in what may eventually turn out to be a possible cure for this disease.”
The American Cancer Society's position on the question of a possible cause-effect relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer is:
1. The evidence to date justifies suspicion that cigarette smoking does, to a degree as yet undetermined, increase the likelihood of developing cancer of the lung.
2. That available evidence does not constitute irrefutable proof that cigarette smoking is wholly or chiefly or partly responsible for lung cancer.
3. That the evidence at hand calls for the extension of statistical and laboratory studies designed to confirm or deny a causual relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
4. That the society is committed to furthering such intensified investigation as its resources will permit.
1. The evidence to date justifies suspicion that cigarette smoking does, to a degree as yet undetermined, increase the likelihood of developing cancer of the lung.
2. That available evidence does not constitute irrefutable proof that cigarette smoking is wholly or chiefly or partly responsible for lung cancer.
3. That the evidence at hand calls for the extension of statistical and laboratory studies designed to confirm or deny a causual relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
4. That the society is committed to furthering such intensified investigation as its resources will permit.
The cancer scare has increased the use of borrowed cigarettes.
The century of biology upon which we are now well embarked is no matter of trivialities. It is a movement of really heroic dimensions, one of the great episodes in man’s intellectual history. The scientists who are carrying the movement forward talk in terms of nucleo-proteins, of ultracentrifuges, of biochemical genetics, of electrophoresis, of the electron microscope, of molecular morphology, of radioactive isotopes. But do not be misled by these horrendous terms, and above all do not be fooled into thinking this is mere gadgetry. This is the dependable way to seek a solution of the cancer and polio problems, the problems of rheumatism and of the heart. This is the knowledge on which we must base our solution of the population and food problems. This is the understanding of life.
The discovery that viral genes cause cancer was made by Peyton Rous, a medical pathologist whose imagination was aroused when a chicken breeder brought him a hen with a tumor.
The effort to eliminate synthetic pesticides because of unsubstantiated fears about residues in food will make fruits and vegetables more expensive, decrease consumption, and thus increase cancer rates. The levels of synthetic pesticide residues are trivial in comparison to natural chemicals, and thus their potential for cancer causation is extremely low. [Ames believes that “to eat your veggies” is the best way to prevent cancer.]
The fact that death from cancer is on the increase is not only a problem of medicine, but its at the same time testifies to the wonderful efficiency of medical science... [as it] enables more persons top live long enough to develop some kind of cancer in old and less resistant tissues.
The first observation of cancer cells in the smear of the uterine cervix gave me one of the greatest thrills I ever experienced during my scientific career.
The late Alan Gregg pointed out that human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled… Four million a month—the equivalent of the population of Chicago… We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.
The politician … is sometimes tempted to encroach on the normal territory of the scientific estate. Sometimes he interferes directly with the scientist’s pursuit of basic science; but he is more likely to interfere when the scientist proposes to publish findings that upset the established political or economic order, or when he joins with the engineering or medical profession in proposing to translate the findings of science into new policies. … Who decides when the apparent consensus of scientific opinion on the relation of cigarettes to lung cancer is great enough to justify governmental regulatory action, and of what kind? In such issues the problem is less often whether politics will presume to dictate to science than it is how much politics is to be influenced by the new findings of science.
The realization of the role played by DNA has had absolutely no consequence for either therapy or prevention…. Treatments for cancer remain today what they were before molecular biology was ever thought of: cut it out, burn it out, or poison it.
The risk of developing carcinoma of the lung increases steadily as the amount smoked increases. If the risk among non-smokers is taken as unity and the resulting ratios in the three age groups in which a large number of patients were interviewed (ages 45 to 74) are averaged, the relative risks become 6, 19, 26, 49, and 65 when the number of cigarettes smoked a day are 3, 10, 20, 35, and, say, 60—that is, the mid-points of each smoking group. In other words, on the admittedly speculative assumptions we have made, the risk seems to vary in approximately simple proportion with the amount smoked.
The sick are still in General Mixed Workhouses—the maternity cases, the cancerous, the venereal, the chronically infirm, and even the infectious, all together in one building, often in the same ward where they cannot be treated.
The specific qualities in diseases also tend more rapidly to the skin than to the deeper-seated parts, except the cancer; although even in this disease the progress towards the superficies is more quick than its progress towards the centre. In short, this is a law in nature, and it probably is upon the same principle by which vegetables always approach the surface of the earth.
They hold that the function of universities is to make learning repellent and thus to prevent its becoming dangerously common. And they discharge this beneficent function all the more efficiently because they do it unconsciously and automatically. The professors think they are advancing healthy intellectual assimilation and digestion when they are in reality little better than cancer on the stomach.
Think of a single problem confronting the world today. Disease, poverty, global warming… If the problem is going to be solved, it is science that is going to solve it. Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do. If anyone ever cures cancer, it will be a guy with a science degree. Or a woman with a science degree.
This alleged damage which the small radioactivity is causing—supposedly cancer and leukemia—has not been proved, to the best of my knowledge, by decent and clear statistics. It is possible that there is damage. It is even possible, to my mind, that there is no damage; and there is the possibility, further, that very small amounts of radioactivity are helpful.
We “need” cancer because, by the very fact of its incurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer.
We divide the world…
Into things that give you cancer and the things that cure cancer
And the things that don't cause cancer, but there's a chance they will cause cancer in the future.
Into things that give you cancer and the things that cure cancer
And the things that don't cause cancer, but there's a chance they will cause cancer in the future.
We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Almost a third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen.
While there are several chronic diseases more destructive to life than cancer, none is more feared.
You know, my father died of cancer when I was a teenager. He had it before it became popular.