“Wherever you go, there are three icons that everyone knows: Jesus Christ, Pele and Coca-Cola.”
Dawkins has stated on many occasions that this passage will be read at his funeral.
Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
Context: We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
“I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.”
“Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.”
Interviewed in Los Angeles on the occasion of her 75th birthday, December 1976, as quoted in Newsweek Vol. 88, p. 157
1970s
“If I die tonight, then I guess I die tonight
Let me go on.”
Falling Out Of Love At This Volume
A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997 (1998)
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
