Herbert M. Shelton Quotes

Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.

General Motors, General Mills, General Foods, general ignorance, general apathy, and general cussedness elect presidents and Congressmen and maintain them in power.

It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.

Although man has included meat in his diet for thousands of years, his anatomy and physiology, and the chemistry of his digestive juices, are still unmistakably those of a frugivorous animal.

There is not a single argument nor a single fact that can be offered in favour of flesh eating that cannot be offered, with equal strength, in favour of cannibalism.

I would not go so far as to say that vaccination has never saved a person from smallpox. It is a matter of record that thousands of the victims of this superstitious rite have been saved from smallpox by the immunizing potency of death. But it is a fact that the official statistics of England and Wales show unmistakably that, while vaccination has killed ten times more people than smallpox, there has been a decrease in smallpox concomitant with the decrease in vaccination. . . It might be appropriately asked, in the words of the Vaccination Inquirer

You don't need treatment. The fever, inflammation, coughing, etc., constitute the healing process. Just get out of their way and permit them to complete their work. Don't try to 'aid' nature. She doesn't need your puny aid—she only asks that you cease interfering.

Life should be built on the conservation of energy.

Cutting out bad habits is far more effective than cutting out organs.

Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant as the turning of the earth on its axis. Man can neither duplicate nor imitate nor provide a substitute for the process. All schools of healing are frauds.

Moderation is the only rule of a healthful life. This means moderation in all things wholesome.

These men [medical doctors] plan ways of doubling their incomes and come to the public with the plea that they are sincerely interested in the health and welfare of our children and that they put over their income-increasing programs for the health of our babies and for the welfare of the school children. They are as cold-blooded as any class of criminals on the whole earth. Indeed, I know of no other class of criminals who live by crippling, maiming and killing babies and children.

"Science" is pedantic, arrogant, esoteric and often insane.

A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station—all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness.

What the sick need is teachers not treaters, health schools not hospitals, instruction not treatment, education in right living not training the sick habit. Both they and their advisors must get rid of the curing idea and the practices built up thereon.

Deep within the human constitution lie written laws of nature that should guide man in the conduct of his life.

If you desire truly to live you will cease trying to find magic tricks and short-cuts to life and learn the simple laws of being, and order your life in conformity with these. Realign your life with the laws of nature—this and this alone constitutes living to live.

There are but a few blood purifiers and these are all in the body. We know them as the liver, kidneys, lungs, colon, and a few glands.

Old age is not a time of life. It is a condition of the body. It is not time that ages the body, it is abuse that does.

There are many things to resist, but disease is not one of them.

An intelligent person may be wrong sometimes, but a fool is never wrong. The medical profession is never wrong.

The so-called symptoms of disease are manifestations of an inherent principle of the organism to restore healthy function and to resist offending agents and influences.

So long as the processes of healing were not understood and man thought that the power to heal resided in substances and things outside of him, he logically sought for extrinsic means of healing, and a healing art was a logical development. The system of medicine, as we know it today, was a logical development out of the fallacy that healing power resides in extrinsic sources.

Health and disease are the same thing—vital action intended to preserve, maintain, and protect the body. There is no more reason for treating disease than there is for treating health.

In a fast, the body tears down its defective parts and then builds anew when eating is resumed.

Food-addiction, or food-drunkenness, is an old story in Hygienic literature. This is the first mention I have seen of it in "regular" medical literature. I fear to hope that its recognition spells progress.

At the very dawn of history, the care of the sick was actually superior to what the great majority of mankind receive today when ill.

We cannot be damaged into health.

Substances that are injurious to the well are equally (or more so) injurious to the sick.