Odysseas Elytis's Quotes

You'll come to learn a great deal if you study the Insignificant in depth.

Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.

As an academic, what do you have? You have the quality of your work and the integrity with which you do it.

Guilt. It comes naturally to me as a Jew and a Liberal.

I guess, as an Emanuel, I have a voice that carries.

Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness.

We're all on a continuous journey to try and fix our mistakes and flaws. And, believe me, I've got plenty of them.

Anyone who lives in Washington and has an official position viscerally understands the cost of a lack of privacy. Every dinner - especially ones with a journalist in attendance - is preceded by the mandatory, 'This is off the record.' But everyone also knows, nothing is really 'off the record.'

By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life.

Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child's death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.

Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don't have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it's a very difficult conversation. It's emotionally draining.

I am not sure precisely why we need to have privacy, but everyone knows for sure that we need to relax and not have to put on our social, outwardly looking face all of the time.

I'm the son of a pediatrician, and I do believe that the most important resource we have is our kids. And I think the most important thing for America's future is to invest more in our children.

My father always has been attractive because of his energy, warmth, charm, and talent for finding some connection with people from all cultures and walks of life. He rarely observed social formalities and niceties - something he has passed on to his boys.

Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.

Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been profound ethical issues confronting doctors since the birth of Western medicine, more than 2,000 years ago.

Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life... Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.

The assumption should be that we will not appear in print or the blogosphere. Having dinner should not be fodder for Facebook. And this is just as true for 'public personalities' as it is for the average person. After all, even people in the public eye have a right to a private life.

The president recognizes that funding global health is good for national security, domestic health and global diplomacy. Consequently, President Obama has steadily increased funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which was created by President Bush and has strong bipartisan support.

The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn't going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We're torn about these things.

Truth be told, for a 21st Century American Jew there is something hollow in the Seder's liberation story and the commandment to feel as if you were there.

Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.

When my children were growing up, we began every family meal - which included breakfast and dinner every day - with a prayer. We are Jewish and so it was the prayer over bread, when we were having bread, or the catch-all prayer for everything when we weren't.