“Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”
"The Feast of Nemesis"
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Saki58
British writer 1870–1916Related quotes
Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer
"The Plowboy Interview: Frank Herbert", in Mother Earth News No. 69 (May/June 1981)
General sources
Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter
Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/death-to-smoochy-2002 of Death to Smoochy (29 March 2002) <br class="br">Reviews, Half-star reviews
“Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.”
P. J. O'Rourke book Holidays in Hell
Holidays in Hell (1989)
“People who fear death live no longer than those who don't, and live scared.”
The Wizard Knight (2004), Volume 1: The Knight, Ch. 62
Fiction
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Have You a Hobby?, Answers, 21 April 1934
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol IV, Churchill at Large, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 288. ISBN 0903988453
The 1930s
Sinnathamby Rajaratnam (1915–2006) Early life
Lee Kuan Yew, in an interview with Channel NewsAsia in 2005. http://viweb.freehosting.net/SRajaratnam.htm
Henry George book Progress and Poverty
Introductory : The Problem
Progress and Poverty (1879)
Context: At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past. … It is true that disappointment has followed disappointment, and that discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor. But there have been so many things to which it seemed this failure could be laid, that up to our time the new faith has hardly weakened. We have better appreciated the difficulties to be overcome; but not the less trusted that the tendency of the times was to overcome them.
Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the civilized world come complaints of industrial depression; of labor condemned to involuntary idleness; of capital massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among businessmen; of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes. All the dull, deadening pain, all the keen, maddening anguish, that to great masses of men are involved in the words "hard times," afflict the world to-day. This state of things, common to communities differing so widely in situation, in political institutions, in fiscal and financial systems, in density of population and in social organization, can hardly be accounted for by local causes.
Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist
Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 5, “Pseudoscience: What Some People Do Isn’t Science” (p. 95)