Maitreyi

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“TB in the twenty-first century is not really caused by a bacteria that we know how to kill. TB in the twenty-first century is really caused by those social determinants of health, which at their core are about human-built systems for extracting and allocating resources. The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis, is for lack of a better term, us.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Audrey had never understood why mean words sounded louder than kind ones.”
― Sarah Morgan, One Summer in Paris

“People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis but it’s not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics, it’s because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection