Half the population QUOTES

1 " [Books are] vital to learning. Half the population don't go to football matches but that doesn't make football any less important. "

― John Sutherland

2 " He fell in with the quiet revolutionaries on campus—those who felt that the disenfranchisement of half the population was ridiculous, those who did not accept that rights were predicated on skin tone—partly because he couldn’t bring himself to avoid tempting trouble. He agreed with all their points, but understood that they were freer to make them purely because they had the money to build a wall around their experiences. That was what people did, wasn’t it? Ignore the majority of experience and actively disengage from those telling them otherwise. "

― Thomm Quackenbush , Flies to Wanton Boys

3 " I've always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It's hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever if felt like it you'd learn deceit too. Biology is destiny. You can't blame women. "

― Glen Duncan , The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf #1)

4 " No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal—but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell. "

― Philip Ball , The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science