A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.
Jane Smiley

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
John Steinbeck

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
Oscar Wilde

Anyway, that was the germ of the idea and of course... you know this was early days of sociology and whatever, especially on television.
Michael Apted

Black people are inferior to Caucasians. Blacks constitute a totally distinct group; they overshadow the country with the germ... of evil.
David Wilmot

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.
G. Stanley Hall

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Thomas Jefferson

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
Pearl S. Buck

If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America... that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers and poison the fair fruits of freedom.
Ernestine L. Rose

Many a trace, and many a germ of this infantile disease, to which without a doubt, I also am a victim, has been chased away by your brochure, or will yet be eradicated by it.
Herman Gorter

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
James Madison

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.
Emma Goldman

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Victor Hugo

The greatest fear that haunts this city is a suitcase bomb, nuclear or germ. Many people carry small gas masks. The masses here seem to be resigned to the inevitable, believing an attack of major proportions will happen.
David Wilkerson

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.
Berthold Auerbach

The private sector can go forward, if it must, with destruction of embryos for questionable and ethically challenged science. But spend the people's money on proven blood cord, bone marrow, germ cell, and adult cell research.
Roger Wicker

There are words which are worth as much as the best actions, for they contain the germ of them all.
Anne Sophie Swetchine

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.
Norman Douglas

There's always a germ of truth in just about everything.
Jim Lehrer

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
F. Scott Fitzgerald