Prescribe Quotes

“Physicians do not systematically prescribe placebos to their patients. Hence they have no way of comparing the effects of the drugs they prescribe to placebos. When they prescribe a treatment and it works, their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment. But there are thousands of treatments that have worked in clinical practice throughout history. Powdered stone worked. So did lizard's blood, and crocodile dung, and pig's teeth and dolphin's genitalia and frog's sperm. Patients have been given just about every ingestible - though often indigestible - substance imaginable. They have been 'purged, puked, poisoned, sweated, and shocked', and if these treatments did not kill them, they may have made them better.”

— Irving Kirsch

“If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.”

— Vincent Price

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
[West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)]”

— Robert H. Jackson

“A comedian is simply a different kind of therapist. A comedian is a psychologist and a psychiatrist rolled into one. Except I can't prescribe medicine. (You still need a doctorate, which is bullshit.) Okay, so I'm not like a psychiatrist. Fine. But I'm still like a psychologist (except I can't diagnose or treat mental illness).”

— Eugene Mirman

“Have you ever tried doing nothing? It's actually really hard. There are so many distractions. But it's the best feeling in the world. If I could prescribe a bottle of nothing to people, it would make life so much better.”

— Katie Kacvinsky

“Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you.”

— Christopher Morley

“My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house. My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood. As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords.”

— Sun Tzu

“They should prescribe you for depression instead of pills”

— Cecelia Ahern

“People and organizations other than doctors increasingly are assuming power to decide which medications to prescribe or procedures to undertake. More and more, decisions about personal healthcare are no longer made by the treating physicians in consultation with their patients, and based on the doctors' expertise.”

— Bob Barr

“When you prescribe a new drug, often you are prescribing something that has only been tested in a few thousand people for a very short period of time, perhaps only six months, and that's not long enough to know whether there are any medium- or long-term side effects.”

— Ben Goldacre

“We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.”

— Carl Friedrich Gauss

“It's easy to prescribe remedies for our own weaknesses when they're comfortably ensconced in other people. What”

— Scott Lynch

“How dare you - "
"How dare I offer you more than you could've ever dreamed?"
"How dare you waltz in here and presume - "
"Presume to prescribe a future with hope and promise?"
I shut my mouth abruptly, glaring at him. Then, "Are you quite finished?"
"Are you?" he asked.
"I am a free woman, Mr.Kensington. Grown. I can do as I wish.I may be blood kin to you, but I am not your employee." My eyes cut to Mama, but hers remained on the barn.
"Regardless, you shall do as I say."
I let out a sputtering, exasperated laugh. "And if I do not?"
He traced the edge of his chipped china saucer. "That would be ill advised.”

— Lisa Tawn Bergren

“A doctor today would never prescribe the treatments my grandfather used in the Confederate Army, but a minister says pretty much the same thing today that a minister would have said back then.”

— John Templeton

“Ty pointed his beer at Josh. "Want to know what I think?"
"No," Josh said.
"I think you have a case of being a little girl. Maybe you should prescribe yourself a heavy dose of man-the-fuck-up.”

— Jill Shalvis

“[T]he mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.”

— Ayn Rand

“Why do they always prescribe thyroid medicine to go with the mental illness cocktails they whip up?”

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

“And he then you will remember that for you to go to harvard has been your mothers dream since you were born and no compson has ever disappointed a lady and i temporary it will be better for me for all of us and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans wellbeing and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was The last note sounded. At”

— William Faulkner

“Let us not say that we will decide on a political basis at the national level that no State is competent to regulate the practice of medicine in that State if they decide to allow a doctor to prescribe marijuana, because that is what we are talking about.”

— Barney Frank

“It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.”

— Ralph Fiennes

“Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.”

— Mason Cooley

“No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

“I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple.”

— Frantz Fanon

“A state rep in Oklahoma gave a horrific speech where she felt the homosexual agenda was a greater threat to America than terrorism. People like this - there's not hate in their hearts. They believe what they believe because of the book that they prescribe to. You can't argue with these people.”

— Leslie Jordan

“Unless we understand what it is that leads to economic and financial instability, we cannot prescribe
make policy
to modify or eliminate it. Identifying a phenomenon is not enough; we need a theory that makes instability a normal result in our economy and gives us handles to control it.”

— Hyman Minsky

“This is the Physician's work, not mine; it is my business to trust, and His to prescribe.”

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“I do not know by what power I think; but well I know that I should never have thought without the assistance of my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent substances I do not at all doubt; but that it is impossible for God to communicate the faculty of thinking to matter, I doubt very much. I revere the Eternal Power, to which it would ill become me to prescribe bounds. I affirm nothing, and am contented to believe that many things are possible than are usually thought so.”

— Voltaire

“Just as we need to encourage women to test life's many options, we need to acknowledge real limits of energy and resources. It would be pointless and cruel to prescribe role combination for every woman at each moment of her life. Life has its seasons. There are moments when a woman ought to invest emotionally in many different roles, and other moments when she may need to conserve her psychological energies.”

— Faye J Crosby

“In our laws ... by the oath which they prescribe, we appeal to the Supreme Being so to deal with us hereafter as we observe the obligation of our oaths. The Pagan world ... are without the mighty influence of this principle which is proclaimed in the Christian system.”

— Rufus King

“In the expressions we adopt to prescribe physical phenomena we necessarily hover between two extremes. We either have to choose a word which implies more than we can prove, or we have to use vague and general terms which hide the essential point, instead of bringing it out. The history of electrical theories furnishes a good example.”

— Arthur Schuster

“The birth control pill, to a great degree, made possible the (hetero)sexual revolution. Yet those who developed oral contraceptives did not intend their work to promote what the majority of Americans at the time called "promiscuity." Doctors generally refused to prescribe the pill to women who were not married; the Supreme Court did not rule this practice unconstitutional until 1972.”

— Beth Bailey

“It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.”

— Tom Sturridge

“I don't feel any great need to subscribe to a certain notion of Buddhism that says "You have to do this" or "You have to do that." Buddhism does not prescribe rituals or prohibitions in the way many religions do.”

— Pankaj Mishra

“Leadership is an elusive concept, hard to describe and impossible to prescribe. It is more evident in its absence, so that when leadership is needed, its lack is sorely felt.”

— Patrick Dodson

“There are many ways to prescribe happiness but there is one way that is available to everybody, it's not very expensive ... it's very democratic, and everyone has acesss to it. It is: Find someone who needs help and help him for no ulterior motive.”

— Yossi Vardi

“I think part of being an artist is having the ability to define your own responsibilities. I certainly wouldn't prescribe any. As far as I'm concerned, my biggest responsibility is to my own imagination. We're all conduits. Art preceded me, and it'll be here long after I'm gone.”

— Pierre Coupey

“It is frightening how dependent on drugs we are all becoming and how easy it is for doctors to prescribe them as the universal panacea for our ills.”

— Prince Charles

“It seems to me an utterly futile task to prescribe rules and limitations for the conduct of war. War is not a game; hence one cannot wage war by rules as one would in playing games. Our fight must be against war itself. The masses of people can most effectively fight the institution of war by establishing an organization for the absolute refusal of military service.”

— Albert Einstein

“In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make. He can choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound democracy, and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man.”

— Ida Tarbell

“Whoever takes it upon himself to establish a commonwealth and prescribe laws must presuppose all men naturally bad, and that they will yield to their innate evil passions as often as they can do so with safety.”

— Niccolo Machiavelli

“If they prescribe pain killers that may increase the possibility of death so long as their specific intention was not to end life." "Doctors should do everything they can to reduce pain, but not to administer drugs to end life, I think we go over a line then.”

— Joe Lieberman

“Poverty, we may say, surrounds a man with ready-made barriers, which if they do mournfully gall and hamper, do at least prescribe for him, and force on him, a sort of course and goal; a safe and beaten, though a circuitous, course. A great part of his guidance is secure against fatal error, is withdrawn from his control. The rich, again, has his whole life to guide, without goal or barrier, save of his own choosing, and, tempted, is too likely to guide it ill.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the General Government.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“It is the peculiar province of the legislature to prescribe general rules for the government of society; the application of those rules to individuals in society would seem to be the duty of other departments.”

— John Marshall

“The attempt to regulate, control, and prescribe all manner of conduct and social relations is very old. It was always the practice of primitive peoples.”

— Calvin Coolidge

“A government must govern, must prescribe and enforce laws within its sphere or cease to be a government. Moreover, the individual must be independent and free within his own sphere or cease to be an individual. The fundamental question ... is now, and always will be through what adjustments, by what actions, these principles may be applied.”

— Calvin Coolidge

“It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, ... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.”

— George McGovern

“Just as it would be madness to settle on medical treatment for the body of a person by taking an opinion poll of the neighbors, so it is irrational to prescribe for the body politic by polling the opinions of the people at large.”

— Plato

“Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man,
never darkened across any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping- coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe a cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson