Hardship Quotes - page 8
You cannot do better, I think, than commit yourself to the care of one of the Stockton captains who are for the most part very honest people, except, indeed, where it is their interest to be otherwise, which is as much as one can say of any body. If you can get nothing better on board of ship than biscuit and water, you may certainly make a shift to subsist upon that food for a week or two, and though there may be neither bed nor hammock for you, when a person is fatigued he will sleep very comfortably on a cabin floor or a coil of rope. Besides, a little temporary hardship at the outset of your expedition into the world may teach you to bear those greater misfortunes to which all are liable, with more philosophy....
Joseph Ritson
As hunger and hardship increase, the world may see more than one wave of more than one disease. If and when an influenza pandemic emerges, for instance, many AIDS sufferers will succumb, but people infected with the AIDS precursor, HIV, will still survive influenza and AIDS will march on. India, for example, was among the hardest-hit nations in the 1918 flu pandemic. Today it has among the highest rates of AIDS infection. The age-old human enemies, tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, streptococcus, and other members of the familiar gang will be on hand with new immunity to the old techno-tricks of the [nineteenth and] twentieth centur[ies]. Even after these diseases may have spent themselves for a while, climate change [which in turn could create new diseases] will still be with us. Nobody really knows where that is taking us, though we do know that the human race has endured more than one ice age in the past.
James Howard Kunstler