Samuel Hopkins Adams Quotes

With a few honorable exceptions the press of the United States is at the beck and call of the patent medicines. Not only do the newspapers modify news possibly affecting these interests, but they sometimes become their agents.

We are living at a time when creeds and ideologies vary and clash. But the gospel of human sympathy is universal and eternal.

The ordinary run of advertising is nothing more than an effort to sell something by yelling in print.

Ignorance and credulous hope make the market for most proprietary remedies.

Any physician who advertises a positive cure for any disease, who issues nostrum testimonials, who sells his services to a secret remedy, or who diagnoses and treats by mail patients he has never seen, is a quack.

Anything is easy to the man who sees.... The open eye of the open mind--that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised.

The path of the pursuer and the prey often run obscurely parallel.

Shut your eyes to the medical columns of the newspapers, and you will save yourself many forebodings and symptoms.

Work won't do me any good ... I've tried it, and it bored me worse than the other thing.

Boredom is simply romanticism with a morning-after thirst.

Printer's ink, when it spells out a doctor's promise to cure, is one of the subtlest and most dangerous of poisons.

You never get bored ... when you have the probabilities of your next meal to speculate on, pro and con.

With the exception of lawyers, there is no profession which, considers itself above the law so widely as the medical profession.

Average Jones had come by his nickname inevitably. His parents had foredoomed him to it when they furnished him with the initials A. V. R. E. as preface to his birthright of J for Jones. His character apparently justified the chance concomitance. He was, so to speak, a composite photograph of any thousand well-conditioned, clean-living Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.

According to the estimate of a prominent advertising firm, above 90 per cent, of the earning capacity of the prominent nostrums is represented by their advertising. And all this advertising is based on the well-proven theory of the public's pitiable ignorance and gullibility in the vitally important matter of health.

Medicine would be the ideal profession if it did not involve giving pain.

Success: a marvelous stimulant, bubbling with inspiration and incitement. But for all except the few who are strong and steadfast, there lurks beneath the effervescence a subtle poison.

Boredom and booze--cause and effect.

Shortest straw pulls the skunk's tail.

I'd sell my soul to the devil if he'd buy such a weakly, puny, piffling little soul, just really to live and be something besides a "thoroughly nice girl" for one short year.

I'm a suicide. I walked right spang over the edge of life and disappeared. Splash! Bubble-bubble! There goes nothing.

A wasted human being--that's a sort of practical blasphemy, according to my religion.