
“Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”
Elihu Thomas lays down principles for inventors, by Thomas, E., Electrical World 75 (1920), p. 1505.
Context: Shall an invention be patented or donated to the public freely? I have known some well-meaning scientific men … to look askance at the patenting of inventions, as if it were a rather selfish and ungracious act, essentially unworthy. The answer is very simple. Publish an invention freely, and it will almost surely die from lack of interest in its development. It will not be developed and the world will not be benefited. Patent it, and if valuable, it will be taken up and developed into a business.
“Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”
Waiting on God (1950), Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God
Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I'd read to them at night what I'd written during the day, and they'd say, "Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!" A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn't done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don't find, or didn't at that time, in children's books. When we'd run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That's how it happened.
"The Tasks of the Revolution" (9 October 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/09.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, 1972, pp. 59 - 68.
1910s
“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack”
'of what is found there.'
Journey to Love (1955), Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
Source: Asphodel, That Greeny Flower and Other Love Poems: That Greeny Flower