The Mosquito Quotes

“Blood type O seems to be the vintage of choice over types A and B or their blend. People with blood type O get bitten twice as often as those with type A, with type B falling somewhere in between.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“In truth”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“At the onset of the slave revolt in 1791, Haiti (called Saint-Domingue until the expulsion of the French) had 8,000 plantations and produced half of the world’s coffee. It was also a leading exporter of sugar, cotton, tobacco, cocoa, and indigo, which was used as a posh purple-blue fabric dye. The petite island colony accounted for an astounding 35% of France’s total mercantilist economic empire.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“With American independence, British Parliament was forced to consider an alternative station to unload a swelling number of domestic felons. The fledgling colony of the Gambia was originally considered, but it was deemed that exile to Africa amounted to nothing more than a death sentence. Within one year of arrival, 80% of the British diaspora perished from mosquito-borne disease. This defeated the dual purpose of a penal colony: to punish and rid the mother country of criminals, while using these banished British subjects as the vanguard of colonization. If convicts could not survive, how could these colonies eventually thrive? The first 1,336 British convicts arrived at the substitute destination of Botany Bay (Sydney) in January 1788, and British Australia was born.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“The Americans, led by General Horatio Gates and a fired-up, heroic Benedict Arnold, captured or killed 7,500 British troops against only 100 losses of their own. This show of force was enough to convince the French that the Americans had a fighting chance. France officially joined the American cause in 1778, with Spain aligning the following year, followed by the Netherlands a year later. It is doubtful that the Americans would have won the war without this timely French intervention. The”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Kourou, and much of the former penal colony, is now home to the European Space Agency’s spaceport and launch site.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Deemed a disloyal threat, the undesirable Acadians were forcibly removed during the “Great Expulsion,” leading to one of the most altogether strange and scandalous side stories of colonialism, courtesy of the mosquitoes basking in the infernos of Guyana. After bouncing around the Americas from Charleston to the inhospitable Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, a sizable contingent of refugee Acadians were permitted by Spain to settle in Louisiana, where they remain today. With time and isolation, these Acadians evolved and fostered the modern-day Cajun culture. The word itself morphed from “Acadian” into “Cajun.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“St. Pierre and Miquelon, 95 square miles combined, were the last vestiges of French territory in North America. Currently, these islands, which by all territorial and economic logic should be Canadian, officially remain a self-governing overseas possession of France.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Needing the French settlement at New Orleans to survive, the Mississippi Company arranged for French male prisoners to be set free on the conditions that they marry prostitutes and embark for New Orleans. These newly married couples were chained together until their vessels reached open waters. Between 1719 and 1721, three shipments of these altogether strange bedfellows were transplanted to New Orleans, where it was anticipated they would breed a new country-born, seasoned population. Despite the mosquito’s best efforts, New Orleans and its handful of disease-seasoned settlers survived and the port city became the entry point and epicenter for numerous catastrophic epidemics of mosquito-borne disease, chiefly yellow fever that surged up and down the Mississippi River, with historic consequences.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“By the 1840s, British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. They added gin to the liquid to cut its bitter taste and, most certainly, for its intoxicating effect. And the gin and tonic cocktail was born. It became the drink of choice for Anglo-Indians and is now of course a universal staple on bar tabs worldwide.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Geneticists believe that 8–10% of people living in the former Mongol Empire are a direct lineage of Genghis Khan.* To put this another way, roughly 40–45 million people currently on the planet are his direct descendants. If we collected all the descendants of Genghis Khan into one country, it would be the thirtieth most populous nation in the world today, ahead of countries like Canada, Iraq, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and Australia.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Like Brennus’s Gauls, Hannibal’s Carthaginians, and Alaric’s Visigoths before them, Attila’s ferocious Huns were steered and ultimately doomed by the mosquito.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Cleanliness is not next to godliness, except for stinky feet, which emit a bacterium (the same one that ripens and rinds certain cheeses) that is a mosquito aphrodisiac. Mosquitoes are also enticed by deodorants, perfumes, soap, and other applied fragrances.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Cleanliness is not next to godliness, except for stinky feet, which emit a bacterium (the same one that ripens and rinds certain cheeses) that is a mosquito aphrodisiac.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Blood type O seems to be the vintage of choice over types A and B or their blend.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“For the New World as a whole, the Indian population decline in the century or two following Columbus’s arrival is estimated to have been as large as 95 percent.” Conservatively in plain numbers, that is 95 million dead across the Americas—the largest single population catastrophe in recorded human history, nearing an extinction-level event. It far exceeded even the Black Death. On”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“common cold virus; from chickens came “bird flu,” chickenpox, and shingles; pigs and ducks donated influenza; and from cattle arose measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“malaria “delayed the Union victory by months or even years. In the long run this may be worth celebrating. Initially the North proclaimed that its goal was to preserve the nation, not free slaves…. The longer the war ground on, the more willing grew Washington to consider radical measures.” Given the role of the mosquito in prolonging the grinding conflict, he reckons that “part of the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation be assigned to malaria.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“The argument here is straightforward: In the American Revolution the British southern campaigns ultimately led to defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 in part because their forces were much more susceptible to malaria than were the American…. [T]he balance tipped because Britain’s grand strategy committed a larger proportion of the army to malarial (and yellow fever) zones.” A full 70% of the British Army that marched into this southern mosquito maelstrom in 1780 was recruited from the poorer, famished regions of Scotland and the northern counties of England, outside the malaria belt of Pip’s Fenland marshes. Those who had already served some time in the colonies had done so in the northern zone of infection and had not yet been seasoned to American malaria.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Given that Americans currently consume 25% of the world’s coffee, Starbucks ought to raise a toasting glass to the tiny mosquito. “Malaria even explains how the nation of the 1773 Boston Tea Party,” affirms Alex Perry in Lifeblood, “became today’s land of the latte.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Although English privateer-turned-full-pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, blockaded the port of Charleston in 1718, he kept his fleet anchored at a distance for fear of Yellow Jack. He did stop all vessels leaving or entering the port, holding the passengers, including a group of prominent residents, for ransom aboard their own ships. The dreaded pirate Blackbeard, however, was not after valuables or treasure. His instructions were simple. He would release the hostages and depart peacefully when all the medicine in Charleston was safely aboard his ship Queen Anne’s Revenge. His rotten swashbuckling crew was festering with mosquito-borne disease. Within a few days, his demands were met by the frightened citizens of Charleston. When the chests of drugs were furnished, Blackbeard honored his word. He released all ships and captives without harm, albeit only after relieving them of their valuables and fine festoons and frocks.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“The willingness of Africans to participate in the slave trade in Africa allowed it to flourish. Africans delivered fellow Africans into the clutches of European subjugation and servitude, something the mosquito made impossible for Europeans to do themselves. The mosquito would not allow Europeans to pluck Africans from their homelands. Without African slavery, New World mercantilist plantation economics would have failed, quinine would not have been discovered, and Africa would have remained African. The entire Columbian Exchange would have been vastly different, or perhaps not have occurred at all.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“By and large, until the eventual painstaking mass export production of Indonesian-grown cinchona quinine by the Dutch, beginning in the 1850s, the mosquito kept Europeans out of Africa. The cinchona tree is persnickety about altitude, temperature, and soil type. It will grow only in very strict and specific environments. This limited, expensive supply opened the door for numerous quinine shams and impostors to flood the market, feigning to meet the massive demand. William H. McNeill reiterates that “the penetration of the interior of Africa that became a prominent feature of Europe’s expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century would have been impossible without quinine from the Dutch plantations.” Armed with this transplanted quinine, the imperial European scramble for Africa began in 1880 and straddled the decades of the First World War. Quinine was not a panacea, however, as yellow fever continued to stalk Europeans who dared enter the wilds of Africa.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“African transport slavery only became a profitable replacement after local indigenous servitude was no longer an option. An early observer noted “the Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the ghost.” As malaria, and eventually yellow fever, helped to eliminate the feasibility of indigenous slave labor in the hotbed mosquito climates of the Spanish and other European empires, the transatlantic African slave trade flourished. Duffy negativity, thalassemia, and sickle cell provided the Africans hereditary shields against malaria.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“While the insecticidal properties of chrysanthemums targeted the mosquito directly, humans have also experimented with a cornucopia of organic remedies to combat mosquito-borne illness. As a result, even our taste buds have been tainted and trained by the mosquito. Cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, basil, and onions all soften malaria’s symptoms, which may explain why, for millennia, people have added these nutritionally hollow flavorings to their diets.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“During the Blitz of 1940–1941, for example, as German bombs rained down on London, isolated populations of Culex mosquitoes were confined to the air-raid tunnel shelters of the Underground Tube along with the city’s resilient citizens. These trapped mosquitoes quickly adapted to feed on mice, rats, and humans instead of birds and are now a species of mosquito distinct from their aboveground parental counterparts.* What should have taken thousands of years of evolution was accomplished by these mining sapper mosquitoes in less than one hundred years. “In another 100 years time,” jokes Richard Jones, former president of the British Entomological and Natural History Society, “there may be separate Circle Line, Metropolitan Line and Jubilee Line mosquito species in the tunnels below London.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“British control of colonial India required the ability to combat malaria, so Brits in India consumed powdered rations of quinine in the form of “Indian tonic water.” By the 1840s, British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. They added gin to the liquid to cut its bitter taste and, most certainly, for its intoxicating effect. And the gin and tonic cocktail was born. It became the drink of choice for Anglo-Indians and is now of course a universal staple on bar tabs worldwide.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“By 1612, when John Rolfe shipped the first crop of Virginia-grown tobacco to England, London already boasted more than 7,000 “tobacco houses.” These cafés offered nicotine junkies a place to sit and converse while drinking (as smoking was originally labeled) tobacco.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“history books tell us that the use of steel weapons and guns versus those fashioned of stone or wood safeguarded European victories. The real reason that European colonizers displaced or destroyed indigenous peoples, however, was largely a matter of disease and differing immunities. It was the dissemination of exotic European germs and foreign mosquitoes and their diseases unconsciously acting as biological weapons that sounded the death knell for indigenous peoples.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

“Columbus was not even the first foreigner to discover the Americas. Columbus was, however, the first to open the doors permanently to the prevailing presence of Europeans, African slaves, and their diseases in their new world.”
― Timothy C. Winegard, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator