Now, it may be stretching an analogy to compare epidemics of cholera--caused by a known agent--with that epidemic of violent crime... which is destroying our cities. It is unlikely that our social problems can be traced to a single, clearly defined cause in the sense that a bacterial disease is "caused" by a microbe. But, I daresay, social science is about as advanced in the late twentieth century as bacteriological science was in the mid nineteenth century. Our forerunners knew something about cholera; they sensed that its spread was associated with misdirected sewage, filth, and the influx of alien poor into crowded, urban tenements. And we know something about street crime; nowhere has it been reported that a member of the New York Stock Exchange has robbed a poor, black teenager at the point of a gun. Indeed, I am naively confident that an enlightened social scientist of the next century will be able to point out that we had available to us at least some of the clues to the cause of urban crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who would change the name of Arkansas is the original, iron-jawed, brass-mouthed, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wil...ds of the Ozarks! He is the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on his mother's side!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In movies about women, all important historical and natural events are translated into the terms of a woman's daily life. World Wa...r I is not about the Allies versus the Kaiser. It's about how unmarried women become pregnant when they have sex. The Depression is not about an economic collapse. It's about runs in stockings, no money for carfare, and being forced out into the streets. Natural disasters like earthquakes and cholera epidemics are defined by miscarriages and dying children. Everything is couched in terms of what are presumed to be the major events of a woman's life: men, marriage, motherhood, and all the usual "feminine" things. At the same time that big events are made small, personal, small events are made huge.... Thus, the woman's film is a genre that generously empowers a sex that society has relegated to secondary status.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A lock-jaw that bends a man's head back to his heels, hydrophobia, that makes him bark at his wife and babes, insanity, that makes... him eat grass; war, plague; cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was part of the Texas ritual. We're rich as son-of-a-bitch stew but look how homely we are, just as plain-folksy as Grandpappy ...back in 1836. We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Arrive at New Orleans, a city of ships, steamers, flatboats, rafts, mud, fog, filth, stench, and a mixture of races and tongues. C...holera, "some." [At] Planters' Hotel. Mem:--Never get caught in a cheap tavern in a strange city.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man with lantern: Who are you? Captain: The Flying Cloud. 220 days out of New York and 50 days trying to find your blasted ha...rbor. Man with lantern: Nobody asked you to come. Captain: Got anything in this hog-end of the world except fog? Man with lantern: Sure, we've got gold, fountains of gold.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog ...enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter, or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"... In truth I find it ridiculous that a man of his intelligence suffer over this type of person, who is not even interesting, fo...r she is said to be foolish", she added with all the wisdom of people who are not in love, who find that a sensible man should only be unhappy over a person who is worthwhile; it is almost tantamount to being surprised that anyone deign having cholera for having been infected with a creature as small as the vibrio bacilla.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like bei...ng surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »