Plague Quotes

I`d move to Los Angeles if Australia and New Zealand were swallowed up by a huge tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in Europe, and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack.

No one trusts me any more. I spent half the movie Maigret (1988) (TV) arguing with people and I was accused of causing big on-set rows. But what they won`t tell you is I fought for Simeneon. I fought for the maintenance of quality. I don`t believe in lying down on the job. I`ve seen these so-called `nice` actors. Very able fellows like Ian McKellen and Kenneth Branagh. But they`re like bank managers. So sweet and careful. Who needs them? We are suffering a plague of good taste. Give me Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke any day. They project danger. That`s what makes acting - and life - interesting.

I`d move to Los Angeles if New Zealand and Australia were swallowed up by a tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in England and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack.

I could do without the Bubonic Plague.

I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.

I have to shoot without any breaks. I yell at Herzog and hit him. I have to fight for every sequence. I wish Herzog would catch the plague, more than ever.

(on his role as Father Grandier in The Devils (1971)) You would think from the critics` hostility that Ken Russell had tried to pull off some obscene hoax. On the contrary, the film is, I think, an utterly serious attempt to understand the nature of religious and political persecution. It is not in any way exaggerated. If anything, the horrors perpetrated in Loudun in the 17th century were worse than Russell has chosen to show . . . the character of the priest was a marvelous one to act. Ken Russell`s brother-in-law is an historian and he helped me research Grandier`s life, with particular reference to his thesis in celibacy. The people of Loudun loved him. He walked among the plague victims and comforted them. I started to play him as a priest and realized that he was a politician.

The old problems - love, money, security, status, health, etc. - are still here to plague us or please us.

It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.

and other rich Arab states must do more to help wipe out this global plague and terror.

I doubt if the average Englishman felt himself as much oppressed by Charles I as by the plague; or if any colonial American was as much in dread of taxation without representation as of smallpox. And it may reasonably be contended that Walter Reed and William Crawford Gorgas brought to man freedom in a more happy sense and in a larger measure than any military or political leader.

A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal.

Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil.

As for AIDS, it`s a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it`s a quarter; after that it`s a childhood disease.

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

The idea of infection began to be taken far more seriously than it ever had before. Hospitals transformed themselves in response to the new plague - sometimes for the better, but often for the worse, as when, in fear, they cast their ulcerated patients out into the streets.

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.

The divide of race has been America`s constant curse. Each new wave of immigrants gives new targets to old prejudices. Prejudice and contempt, cloaked in the pretense of religious or political conviction, are no different. They have nearly destroyed us in the past. They plague us still. They fuel the fanaticism of terror. They torment the lives of millions in fractured nations around the world. These obsessions cripple both those who are hated and, of course, those who hate, robbing both of what they might become.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.