Quotes on Canaries

Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. _x000D_ They are supersensitive. _x000D_ They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, _x000D_ long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

Are artists the canaries in the mine, warning of the coming explosion before anyone else? It's hard to look at the world before 1914 and not wonder if they somehow felt a catastrophe was bearing down on them and their societies.

Farm workers are society's canaries. Farm workers - and their children - demonstrate the effects of pesticide poisoning before anyone else.

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.

Souls of poets dead and gone, _x000D_ _x000D_ What Elysium have ye known, _x000D_ _x000D_ Happy field or mossy cavern, _x000D_ _x000D_ Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? _x000D_ _x000D_ Have ye tippled drink more fine _x000D_ _x000D_ Than mine host's Canary wine?

Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus!