"Of all the works of civilization that interfere with the natural water distribution system, irrigation has been by far the most pervasive and powerful."

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Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.

— Johan Huizinga