“As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it’s only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it’s gone forever.”

— J. Michael Straczynski, Passing Through Gethsemane

Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 : "Passing Through Gethsemane : jms speaks" (13 July (2004) http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/048.html. <br class="br">Context: As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it’s only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it’s gone forever. No afterlives, no second chances, no backsies. So there can be nothing crueler than the abuse, destruction or wanton taking of a life. It is a crime no less than burning the Mona Lisa, for there is always just one of each. So I cannot forgive.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it’s only here for a brief moment, a flare agai…" by J. Michael Straczynski?

J. Michael Straczynski photo

J. Michael Straczynski20

American writer and television producer 1954

Related quotes

“Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) American psychiatrist

On Death and Dying (1969)

“I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment… only to vanish forever.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Inside Information.
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)

“Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.”

Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) austrian dramatic and writer

“Life is only precious because it ends, kid.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

“What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

“[The atheist's] faith is much greater than mine. I could never for a moment believe that all these things happened by chance. Never in a million years. But the believing atheist does, and he amazingly looks down intellectually on those that maintain that all this incredible creation wasn't an act of an incredible creator.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

“If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.”

Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: 2010s, 2011, Mortality (2012), p. 91.

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Laundry Files

“Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

Related topics