"I have remarked, in the course of such air travel as I have done, that the airmen of all nations have a common resemblance to each other and that the patriotic virus in their blood is largely corrected by a wider professionalism." (Herbert G Wells, "The Outlook for Homo Sapiens", 1942)
"A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in [...]" (Henry Miller, "The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus", 1949)
"Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. [...] Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus." (William S Burroughs, "Naked Lunch", 1959)
"The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell [...] Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated." (William S Burroughs, "Naked Lunch", 1959)
"Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end." (Henry Miller, "The Cosmological Eye (ed. New Directions Publishing, 1961
"When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going." (John Steinbeck, "Travels With Charley: In Search of America", 1962)
"Others have developed cries, songs, words as weapons. Words that cut like buzz saws. Words that vibrate the entrails to jelly. Cold strange words that fall like icy nets on the mind. Virus words that eat the brain to muttering shreds." (William S Burroughs, "The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead", 1971)
"'Ideology', growled one of his new friends. 'It’s a virus. The world is dying of it.'" (Brian W Aldiss, "Three Ways", 1978)
"To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement […] Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus […] thereby it becomes its enemies." (Philip K Dick, "VALIS", 1981)
"Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses - viruses generated from within itself." (Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash", 1992)
"Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more you use it - the more viruses you get exposed to - the better your immune system becomes." (Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash", 1992)
"Fiction is the great virus waiting to do away with fact - that is one of the most ominous meanings of the film." (David Thomson, "Rosebud: the Story of Orson Welles", [on "Of Citizen Kane", 1941 film] 1996)
"You’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure." (Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski, "The Matrix", [film] 1999)
"Only one form of contagion travels faster than a virus. And that's fear." (Dan Brown, "Inferno: A Novel", 2013)
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