Florence Nightingale Quotes

We, 'the United States of America, are now called upon to play the part of Florence Nightingale; to take our stand and insist upon it that the slaughter shall cease. Oh! let us give money, let us give life, but let us stand by our principles of civil and religious liberty.'

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

I often compare Margaret Thatcher with Florence Nightingale. She stalks through the wards of our hospitals as a lady with a lamp. Unfortunately, it's a blowlamp.

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

Florence Nightingale was an amazing figure. She created the American Red Cross. She saw the suffering from bad health conditions on the battlefield and in the military hospitals, and she fought like crazy to change the conditions; to make sure that the doctors washed their hands and practiced sanitary measures. She put herself at great risks.

In France it was Joan of Arc; in the Crimea it was Florence Nightingale; in the deep south there was Rosa Parks; in India there was Mother Teresa and in Florida there was Katherine Harris.

I guess I could've been a prima ballerina. Or a nurse. Aretha Nightingale!

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

For all her active goodness, Florence Nightingale herself was far from being the angelic figure of popular adulation: according to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians she was a self-righteous, domineering amazon, who was ruthless in her compassion, merciless in her philantropy, destructive in friendships, obsessional in her list for power, and demonic in her saintliness.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.