Parasite Quotes

“Don't anticipate for a promise, let it be an unexpected favour, this will increase your power of independence.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“[He] seemed to possess, beneath it all, an immutable sense of self-assurance, but in addition to that, the look of a man ensnared by what he perceived to be his own Duty. A Duty that effervesced inside of him impatiently, dry at the mouth, shaking feverishly, and holding its breath in anticipation for—not his action, but in fact—the fruits of his actions, however distant these may have been. The goal was to satiate its thirst in as few moves as possible, instilling each action with an almost implied necessity for having a motive by which it must exist, which is to say that no action was to be wasted for anything, but only for that which was rooted in some definable and clear-cut purpose...Every action had to be a step in some direction and there could be no dillydallying, for Duty bubbling in the bloodstream for too long brought with it a kind of sickness...from which it was difficult to recover. Neither could there be any reconsideration, for the values to which one has sworn were unassailable and beyond the powers of one individual to reassess. And so, Duty, once instilled, must be allowed to carry on unabated, diverting sustenance away from other aspects of one’s character—driving them to a weakened state, brow-beaten by circumstances beyond their immediate control and relegated to their own downtrodden acquiescence to the bravado of the Parasitic Superego, and, as such, cognizant of their growing superfluity.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Nobody is responsible for your sorrows and poverty, not even the devil. It is the work of the enemies of time that lives in some men, and their names are, 'Laziness and Procrastination'.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“You know how sometimes when you're drifting off to sleep you feel that jolt, like you were falling and caught yourself at the last second? It's nothing to be concerned about, it's usually just the parasite adjusting its grip.”
― David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast. This conclusion would have endeared itself to the warm heart of Alfred Nobel. My contribution to it makes me feel less unworthy of the honour which you have conferred upon me in his name.”
― Charles Nicolle

“Governments represent their citizens in the same way as parasites represent their hosts.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski, The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty

“Junie says that the worst thing about shame is the way it chains you down. The way it holds your mind hostage and won’t let you go, gnawing from the inside out, feeding on you like a parasite.”
― Rasmenia Massoud, You Don't See Any of This

“The unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming. The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless. Not only it is comparable to a parasitic invasion, it’s not comparable to anything else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“Regret is like a mental parasite that alters your behavior.”
― Peter Tieryas, United States of Japan

“The talk of sin is of course to many a big turn-off; to others, an even bigger myth - because in reality, sin is like the spiritual equivalent of a microscopic parasite, or a virus, or better yet even, an infectious disease. And just as one might never know of, until visiting a competent doctor, the tiny pathogens progressively eroding one's body, so we might never know that in sin we are eroding our being and losing direction until hearing the Word of God rightfully applied. Therefore I ask, which of the doctors would then be the more competent: the one who finds the problem and gives the solution, or the one who willfully ignores the problem (or rather finds the problem when it is much too late)? Seldom does anyone write off the knowledge of medicine for the physical body as primitive practice, so neither must the knowledge of the Word of God for one's spiritual well-being remain written off as primitive practice - quite the opposite really. As it is written thus: 'Lean not on your own understanding.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“What is the difference between a parasite and a liberal? The spelling!”
― Ziad K. Abdelnour

“There’s nothing cruel about a vampire or a parasite, she said.”
― Paul Park, All Those Vanished Engines

“Every mad scientist secretly dreams of playing God.”
― Mira Grant, Symbiont

“I wonder how long I’ve been the victim of subliminal messaging from a fetus. I wonder if it goes this way for all pregnant mothers: At first we fully recognize the existential threat that is growing inside us, but gradually evolutionary imperatives overcome the conscious mind’s objection, and the will to reproduce overcomes the will to survive, and the needs of the baby overcome the needs of the host, until the only choice left for us women is to be willing, happy participants in our own destruction.”
― Claire Oshetsky, Chouette

“Day one of school and he was already improving life for his host. What a great parasite he was.”
― Charleigh Frederick, Demon Scout

“Film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. Film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. Film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursivity. Cinema is a parasite.”
― Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife

“Some people do just enough to keep you around because they are AFRAID to know what life would be like without you”
― O. S. Hickman

“In reality, he was living off of his victims. He stole purses, broke into cars, robbed people that were coming out of the subway, and did a lot of shoplifting. He was like a human parasite, which was ironic considering what was going through his body this very moment.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“Criticism is the art wherewith a critic tries to guess himself into a share of the artist’s fame.”
― George Jean Nathan, The House of Satan

“La métamorphose peut aussi être provoquée par un événement extérieur, comme dans le cas de la sacculine, un crustacé parasite. La larve se fixe sur l'abdomen d'un crabe et produit des sortes de racines qui pénètrent à l'intérieur de sa victime, jusqu'à l'extrémité des pattes. Ces suçoirs puisent dans la chair de son hôte tout ce dont le parasite a besoin pour vivre et se reproduire. La sacculine ne provoque pas la mort du crabe qui peut survivre deux ans dans cet état. Cependant, sa présence a un autre effet: elle transforme les mâles et femelles.”
― Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, Métamorphoses Deyrolle

“If you are having mysterious sickness for years that doctors have had little success in treating, an intestinal parasite cleanse is always worth a try.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“Identification of environments throughout human history that have aided parasite transmission, as well as social or cultural practices that have contributed to infections, can help inform approaches that could be taken to mitigate infections today.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“The factors facilitating the global emergence of pathogens shared between humans and animals are of particular importance because the diseases they induce have had major impacts on both human and animal health. This transfer of pathogens has ocurred for thousands, if not millions, of years and continues today.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Our species has co-evolved alongside many others to which we were in contact, especially through scavenging, hunting, and then animal husbandry, all of which would have exposed us to novel pathogens and zoonotic diseases. As a species, we had to adapt to these new pathogens without the benefits of modern medicine. The newly emerging diseases of recent decades, while novel in themselves, are but a repeat of patterns which humans have survived over several millennia.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Today there are almost eight billion people on earth, crowded together and travelling widely -this is 1300 times more than were present when the agricultural revolution began around 10,000 years ago and facilitated the spread of many pathogens.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Humans have always lived surrounded by potential pathogens. Whether they co-exist relatively harmlessly or become a problem, cause acute or chronic disease and spread slowly or in epidemics has been, and still is, influenced by how we have impacted the environments we share with other animals. Pathogens are opportunists within these environments, capable and ready to take advantage of anything that promotes their transmission.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“It was like the Dutch Astronaut I met who had a theory about technology. His take was that technology is actually a new kind of parasite that began to develop consciousness about 100 years ago and which, like all parasites, is gradually taking over its host, strangling the life out of it.”
― Laurie Anderson

“Only producers constitute a market - only men who trade products and services for products and services. In the role of producers, they represent a market’s supply; in the role of consumers, they represent a market’s demand. The law of supply and demand has an implicit subclause: that it involves the same people in both capacities. When this subclause is forgotten, ignored or evaded - you get the economic situation of today.
The man who consumes without producing is a parasite, whether is a welfare recipient or a rich playboy”
― Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It