Cancer quotes
1.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside cancer — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"anyone own a disease? I was also startled at the level of hypocrisy. How can a leading make up company not sign onto the "Campaign for Safe Cosmetics" and at the same time promote itself as leading the fight against breast cancer?"
"Those of us who have gone through breast cancer treatment will say "yes" ..we absolutely need to focus on prevention. I never want my daughter to go through what I have gone through...never."
"The pink campaign has also served to "normalize" and depoliticize the disease and that makes it less threatening for a LOT of companies to jump onboard and claim breast cancer as their cause."
"My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic."
"I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to."
"I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books."
"When I found out I had cancer, I just said one thing: 'I want to hold on to life' and that changed everything for me."
"That is the beauty of cancer, it tells you that your days are limited, that you could die at any point. It is that perspective that allows you to live a better life while you're here."
"[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either."
"In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare."
"The crows that are predatory are something you have to deal with. For me, they also become associated with cancer cells."
"If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity."
"I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families."
"I could not move them. They would not even agree to a modification, of the ruling (banning the Rand vaccine), which would at least allow the 100 (cancer) patients at Richmond Heights (Ohio) to complete their injections. The Justice Department was prepared to go along, but the FDA commissioner, Dr. James Goddard, was adamant, even belligerent. It's wrong of the government to snatch away this hope when there is no evidence against its use offered in court. It's damnably wrong."
"I don't think we will find a cure for all cancers in the next 50 years let alone 20. I think it's foolishness to say that."
"The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured."
"Cancer is a demonic pregnancy."
"Kusewera, an organization that fosters orphanages in Africa and the Philippines and encourages through creative play and education. Anything and everything that supports cancer research. East West Players, the oldest and biggest Asian American theater in the U.S."
"Not smoking enough will cause lung cancer! If anybody is getting a cancerous activity in the lung, the probabilities are that it's radiation dosage coupled with the fact that he smokes. And what it does is start to run out the radiation dosage, don't you see."
"To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now."
