Twelve drawers full of political cancer.

-Anonymous
FBI agent referring to the files of J Edgar Hoover. Quoted in Newsweek, 23 Sep.

I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silence, I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has.

-Beckett, Samuel
Attributed, in conversation with Harold Pinter.

We have a cancer within, close to the presidency, that is growing. It isgrowing daily.

-Dean,John
  Taped conversation with the President, Mar.

My final word, before I'm done, Is 'Cancer can be rather fun'. Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan The NHS is quite like heaven Provided one confronts the tumour With a sufficient sense of humour. I know that cancer often kills, But so do cars and sleeping pills; And it can hurt one till one sweats, So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.

-Haldane,J(ohn) B(urdon) S(anderson)
  'Cancer's a Funny Thing'.

The problems of the world, AIDS, cancer, nuclear war, pollution, are, finally, no more solvable than the problems of a tree which has borne fruit: the apples are overripe and theyare fallingöwhat can be done?† What can be done about the problems which beset our life? Nothing can be done, and nothing needs to be done. Something is being doneöthe organism is preparing to rest.

-Mamet, David Alan
  Writing in Restaurants,'Decay: Some Thoughts for  Actors'.

The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it aloneöits ideologies and inventionsöwhich eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

-Sontag, Susan
  In Partisan Review,Winter.