1960s, Cobo Center speech (1963)
“A man who does not have something for which he is willing to die is not fit to live.”
“A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.”
Variant: If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
Source: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Whoever lives as he sees fit will not die as he sees fit.”
Me & Rumi (2004)
To his son Elinipsico as a mob approached them in Point Pleasant (10 November 1777), as quoted in "Cornstalk, the Shawanee Chief" by Rev. William Henry Foote, in The Southern Literary Messenger Vol. 16, Issue 9, (September 1850) pp. 533-540 http://victorian.fortunecity.com/rothko/420/aniyuntikwalaski/cornstalk.html
“What about what he lives for, Squire? Isn't that the true measure of a man, what he lives for?”
Jim Hawkins, Act II, Scene 6
Long Joan Silver (2013)
Book V : Abysmal Voyage, Ch. 79
Wanderer (1963)
Context: I'll make no bones about it, I'm thinking of quitting analysis. When a man's bogged down, when the thing he is trying to do isn't working out, then he has to damn good and well change his way of living. If you would only hold out some hope to me, then it might be different.
I'll say this, too, that if it hadn't been for you I wouldn’t have turned into a stoolie for J. Edgar Hoover. I don't think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing.
“There is no man living who isn't capable of doing more than he thinks he can do.”
“I will hate the man you choose because he isn't me, and love him if he makes you smile.”
Source: The Eye of the World
