Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively.
Interpretation
People tend to fear and notice obvious problems, while the more subtle issues can be much more harmful.
Rene Dubos highlights a critical aspect of human nature: we often react strongly to visible threats, such as diseases with clear symptoms, while ignoring or underestimating stealthy dangers that may be more damaging in the long run. This quote encourages awareness of less obvious challenges that can undermine our well-being.
In practice
In a speech about public health, one might say, 'As Rene Dubos pointed out, we should not just focus on diseases that are visible but also recognize those that creep up quietly.'
The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.
Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.
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.
Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.
Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.
A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.
First, you have stereotypes, and that will be the black drug dealer, the east Asian kung fu master, the Middle Eastern terrorist in 'True Lies.' Then you have stuff that takes place on culturally specific terrain, that engages with it, but actually subverts assumptions. 'Smashes' stereotypes. That's where I've come into the game.
A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.
The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.
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