"It's never Lupus."
— Gregory House

"There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save."
— Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky)

"As wicked as you are... You're beautiful to me.
You're the darkest burning star, you're my perfect disease.
"
— Five Finger Death Punch

"For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends."
— Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound)

"I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs."
— Andy Warhol

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent."
— R.D. Laing

"In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life."
— Oliver W. Sacks

""The gods have become our diseases.""
— Carl Gustav Jung

"People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs; but there are also strong motivations for taking them. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven't tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them."
— Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)

"Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness."
— Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)

"[T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis."
— Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories)

"For what's the use of talking with a man who has a disease and thinks about the stars?"
— Bertolt Brecht

"It was not until I became a patient facing the diagnosis of a chronic disease, multiple sclerosis, that I finally understood how these patients felt. It was through the repeated experiences of struggling to accept a body that seems to betray you, relinquishing control, needing to ask for assistance with tasks even a child can perform and having to redefine my role in a profession I cherish that I truly understood."
— Alicia M. Conill M.D.

"Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. "Migratory cancer cells" are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion.
Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political.
It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!"
— Wilhelm Reich (Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals 1934-1939)