“In a sentence: Life is bad, but so is death. Of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together, they constitute an existential vise—the wretched grip that enforces our predicament.”

Source: The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (2017), Introduction, pp. 1–2

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David Benatar13

South African philosopher 1966

Quintus Sextius Roman philosopher

Sentences of Sextus

“Death is not such a bad thing. What would be a bad thing would be living without challenges. Without knowing defeat, we cannot know what victory is. There is no life without death.”

Patricia Briggs book River Marked

Source: River Marked

“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

“He’ll get a life sentence for the illegal trafficking alone and probably a death sentence for the people he killed along the way.”

Robert Lynn Asprin (1946–2008) American science fiction and fantasy author

He sighed slightly. “I always did fancy happy endings.”
Source: Wagers of Sin (1996), Chapter 21 (p. 430)

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

“To relish life and to relish death/ And to be grateful for both/ And to be open for more/ In both death and life.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Death: Live It! p. 72.
Death: Live It! (2005)

“The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 11 : Money Et Cetera, p. 100
Context: The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.