Top 494 Cancer Quotes

In the frantic search for an elusive ‘cure,’ few researchers stand back and ask a very basic question: why does cancer exist? What is its place in the grand story of life?

How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?

Cancer will be with me for the rest of my life, be it as a nodule, tumor or cell someplace, or in my fears and anxieties.

While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.

Cancer softened me up. I like the old me better. I liked being angry. It made me feel strong.

Every time I go back to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to wait for my test results, and I wonder if I’ve relapsed or if I’m doing okay, I don’t think about my company. I’m proud of everything we’ve done, but at the end of the day, it comes back to family. I’m still a wife, a mom, a sister – all of those things.

I have six sisters and two beautiful daughters – that’s eight women who mean the world to me. I support the Entertainment Industry Foundation and Lee National Denim Day because they fund programs that are making huge strides in breast cancer research and support.

It was a huge shock when my mum was diagnosed. She was 49 when she found a lump in one of her breasts and sensed something was wrong. At the time, we did a breast cancer campaign together. I still do a lot of charity runs.

I decided to quit ‘Survivor: All-Stars’ in order to be closer to my mother, who ended up passing away from breast cancer seven days after I returned home.

I was hitting .360 when I was diagnosed. I didn’t forget how to play while I was recovering. I don’t know if the cancer is gone for good. I don’t think anyone ever knows, but no one is going to steal my joy for as along as I’m able to play baseball.

It’s been up, down, and sideways for me, man. I could become a huge star, or I could get cancer tomorrow.

The way I look at it is, cancer research is absolutely nonpartisan. Cancer is very democratic in the sense that it attacks people regardless of their race, their gender, their national background, or their political persuasions.

I was at number one in Australia with both my album and my single. And then I was told I had cancer. I thought, ‘What a strange turn of events.’

When I was asked to take part in ‘Celebrity Hunted’ I jumped at the chance, who wouldn’t want to run wild around the U.K. for two weeks being chased by a top secret service type team, whilst raising money for a cause very close to my heart – cancer.

What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We’ve termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.’

Breast cancer isn’t one disease – it’s probably four or five different types, and without knowing what type a person has, you can’t optimize treatment for them.

I’m not a type-B personality who knows I have a cancer growing inside of me and can live with the knowledge. I go into a kung-fu attack position when I go through the door of a hospital.

I am committed to ovarian cancer research on a national level and in my community in the Carolinas. It is important to me to know the women that are true fighters of this difficult disease.

My mother passed away young – she died from ovarian cancer at just 54 years old. Her sacrifices for my sisters and I evoke a tribute in her honor each and every Mother’s Day.

If there’s a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it’s that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

Cancer is such a wake-up call to remind us how high the cosmic stakes really are and how short and brief and frail life really is.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

Bringing together the unique expertise of researchers from both NYU and the Technion will hopefully enable us to overcome some of the most difficult challenges in treating cancer patients.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

We are bombarded with reasons to stay inside: we’re afraid of mosquitoes because of West Nile and grass because of pesticides and sun because of cancer and sunscreen because of vitamin-D deficiency.

And I’m going to work as hard as I can… for cancer research and hopefully, maybe, we’ll have some cures and some breakthroughs. I’d like to think I’m going to fight my brains out to be back here again next year for the Arthur Ashe recipient. I want to give it next year!

What I’ve learned from my own journey, and from my family’s experience with cancer, is how important it is to stay positive and move forward. Not every day is going to be perfect; that’s life. But staying positive is going to get you to the next day.

I have friends who are going through chemotherapy, and they make the darkest, most hideous cancer jokes you’ve ever heard.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so we ended up burying him a year to the day that he was diagnosed.

What really got me focused on cancer was when my best friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, and even though she was a well-to-do person, I found that her treatment costs were crippling.

It’s hard to raise awareness of pancreatic cancer – people who get it don’t live long enough.

There’s no denying that cancer is a gloomy subject. We repeat positive phrases to ourselves as a sort of mantra. And while positive thinking alone can’t cure cancer, attitude is critical to getting through the process and growing as a person.

I am not a doctor or a scientist, but merely a passionate layperson, a filter, a messenger. I spoke with so many patients who are living normal, happy, fulfilled lives, and their enthusiasm and great quality of life convinced me that you can indeed live with cancer.

I like what Don Imus has done through the years to help kids with cancer at the Imus Ranch. He has raised awareness about autism. He has done any number of good things.

I had a cancer scare in the early ’90s, and for a few months, I wondered if I would make it.

My husband, Clay Felker, died 17 years after his first cancer due to secondary conditions that developed from treatment.

My father passed from cancer in 2000; his brother died of cancer before that. My grandfather died of cancer.

Modern society has evolved to the point where we counter the old-fashioned fatalism surrounding the word ‘cancer’ by embracing the idea of the Uber-mind – that our will possesses nearly supernatural powers.

Anyone who’s lost someone to cancer will say this, that you have to struggle to try to remember the person before the diagnosis happened, because they really do change – as anyone would change.

Once I overcame breast cancer, I wasn’t afraid of anything anymore.

More men die of jealousy than of cancer.

The Establishment center… has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster – a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

Mary Lasker was an entrepreneur; she was a socialite. She was kind of a legendary networker. She became interested in saying, ‘Well, you know, if these diseases don’t have political support we’ll never conquer them.’ And she made, really, cancer her special cause.

I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they’ve figured I’m looking at those books.

Once colon cancer becomes symptomatic, nine times out of ten it is too late.

Wood pellet grilling could potentially have a lower risk of cancer when compared to other forms of grilling, as some people say that it leads to the creation of fewer carcinogens.

Historically, more people have died of religion than cancer.

We and other groups are seeing clear statistical links between telomere shortness and risk for a variety of diseases that are becoming very common, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers.

Through my attempt to get pregnant through IVF, we sadly found out that I have early stages of breast cancer. It’s been a shock.

That’s why I talk about the breast cancer: because I want women – and everyone – to stay on top of things and get checked. I know how scary it can be. When I dealt with it, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ And I have so many other friends who have gone through it or have suffered a loss.

Cancer is not one disease but many diseases.

Dementia is our most-feared illness, more than heart disease or cancer.

Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that’s what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should’ve stopped, and that’s cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA.