Blights

“Ted Bundy is one man who so clearly personifies the horror of these twin blights on our society— serial killing and the Republican Party. ❋ Unknown (2006)

In fact, almost all the best-known 'blights' and bladder-forming insects are aphides of one kind or another, affecting leaves, or stalks, or roots, or branches. ❋ Grant Allen (1873)

Thank God there’d been a motorcade often or so cars and he’d just followed them—through the red lights, driving fast, flashing his blights, which is what you’re supposed to do as a cop when you’re in pursuit but don’t have a dashboard flasher. ❋ JEFFERY DEAVER (2003)

Lose them all, and that'll be 25 in a row – the blight of blights in NBA history. ❋ AP (2011)

As both parliamentary chambers resounded with the sound and fury surrounding the gratuitously ruinous NHS plans on Wednesday, the health select committee quietly published a report about a problem which blights millions of lives – the disjoint between medicine and personal care. ❋ Unknown (2012)

They're one of the blights addressed by "Let's Move," the major campaign against childhood obesity launched in 2010 by Michelle Obama. ❋ Linda Novick O'Keefe (2011)

"I very much wish that there were not," replied his visitor, "for then we should have ended the scourge of poverty which blights our land." ❋ Simon Hoggart (2010)

To sustain such financial numbers—and to pave the way for next summer's opening of a 12-acre Cars Land at Disney's California Adventure Park—Pixar and Disney, the animation studio's relatively new owner, needed a hard-sell crowd-pleaser with exactly the sort of high-octane action and high-decibel soundtrack that energizes—or blights, depending on your point of view—"Cars 2." ❋ Joe Morgenstern (2011)

We must face up to the real causes that are contributing not just to these two blights on our society, but to a larger, looming health crisis that is frightening in its implications for us as a society. ❋ Jim Winkler (2012)

The test of the big society initiative will be the extent to which more people come together voluntarily to address the broken society that blights some of our towns and cities. ❋ Unknown (2011)

I didn't say that it would produce less than a surface option, just less than the current Viaduct, which has more lanes and blights a part of the city that ought to support dense waterfront housing and jobs instead. ❋ Unknown (2010)

Currently on a well-regarded stroll around the UK, with this tour single – and 2011's Diamond Mine LP – Hopkins and Creosote eschew the lachrymose sentimentality that blights much modern-day folk-pop. ❋ Unknown (2012)

The Cube is even worse than Holding Out For A Hero with Gethin Jones which, fun-wise, is the televisual equivalent of bleaching teacups while staring at drizzle, listening to one of those Radio 4 mid-afternoon dramas about a harassed social worker coping with an anal fissure that blights her jazz-singing dreams, played by a home counties actress not talented enough to read out things in The Archers. ❋ Unknown (2011)

That is the type of monocropping that is bad for the environment and can lead to wholesale crop losses and blights. ❋ Unknown (2009)

Berkoff's version should be suitably muscular as it tears away the rhetoric that so often blights the play to reveal the real tragedy of a man who sees but who cannot see the truth. ❋ Unknown (2011)

After the tragedy that blights her youth (no spoilers though you might know already), Alice settles down to life as a single librarian in small town America, a position she might have kept for life if not for a chance meeting with rich playboy, Charlie Blackwell. ❋ Unknown (2010)