Thread by @killedbyproxy

"The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison. It was only as time passed and the steady rise in the death-rate could not be ignored that public opinion became alive to the truth."

/Albert Camus, The Plague

"He knew quite well that it was plague and, needless to say, he also knew that, were this to be officially admitted, the authorities would be compelled to take very drastic steps. This was, of course, the explanation of his colleagues' reluctance to face the facts."

Albert Camus

"Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street."

/Albert Camus, The Plague

"We tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away."

/Albert Camus, The Plague

"They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences."

/Albert Camus, The Plague

"Many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits, as yet. Plague was an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come."

"What's true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you'd need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague."

/Albert Camus, The Plague

"There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two do make four is punished with death."

/Albert Camus, The Plague

"Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable."

/Albert Camus, The Plague

"There's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is — common decency."

/Albert Camus, The Plague

"What's natural is the microbe. All the rest — health, integrity, purity (if you like) — is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention."

/Albert Camus

"Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended."

THE END