[If a woman athlete who had contracted the AIDS virus admitted that she] had been with one hundred or two hundred men, they'd call... her a slut, and the corporations would drop her like a lead balloon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of the...ir own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognised as such because it h...as achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here [in London, history] ... seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted ...strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slumism is the pent-up anger of people living on the outside of affluence. Slumism is decay of structure and deterioration of the ...human spirit. Slumism is a virus which spreads through the body politic. As other "isms," it breeds disorder and demagoguery and hate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit... and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame. I don't know how they become so quickly inducted into the presiding mysteries, or who instructs them in the finely articulated inflections of contempt for the laity, but somehow they learn to think of themselves as suppliers of the monetarized DNA that is the breath of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »