Quotes about death

A collection of quotes on the topic of death.

„Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.“

— Richard Ramirez American serial killer 1960 - 2013

Statement to reporters after his death sentences, taken from The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/07/richard-ramirez-night-stalker-dies

„[Fascism] was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly.“

— Oswald Mosley British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists 1896 - 1980

Excerpt from My Life by Oswald Mosley (1968), Ch.16.

World, People

„Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.“

— Gabrielle Zevin, book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

Dead, People

„Death is an eternal sleep.“

— Joseph Fouché French statesman 1759 - 1820

Inscription placed by his orders on the Gates of the Cemeteries in 1794; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Sleep

„The only one who's always punctual is Death“

— Peter Ustinov, Romanoff and Juliet

Act I
Romanoff and Juliet (1956)
Context: The only one who's always punctual is Death … whatever the time he always strikes his knell at the first streak of dawn … and believe me, he knows what he's doing. How I hate the dawn! It's the hour of the firing squad. The last glass of brandy. The ultimate cigarette. The final wish. All the hideously calculated hypocrisy of men when they commit a murder in the name of justice. Then it's the time of death on a grander scale, the hour of the great offenses … fix your bayonets boys …gentlemen, synchronize your watches … in ten seconds time the barrage starts … a thousand men are destined to die in order to capture a farmhouse no one has lived in for years... And finally dawn is the herald of the day, our twelve hours of unimportance, when we have to cede to the pressures of the powers, smile at people we have every reason but expediency to detest … A diplomat these days is nothing but a head-waiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally.

„… women who 'adjust' as housewives, who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife,' are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps… they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.“

— Betty Friedan, book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique

Suffering, Women

„I have no regret that someone openly identified with terrorist organisations and activities meets his death the same way.“

— Sammy Wilson British politician 1953

The Irish Times (September 24, 1988)
After the loyalist killing of Gerard Slane

Way

„The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.“

— John Bright British Radical and Liberal statesman 1811 - 1889

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1855/feb/23/supply-ministerial-explanations to the House of Commons (23 February 1855) opposing the Crimean War.
1850s
Context: The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and the two sideposts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on; he takes his victims from the castle of the noble, the mansion of the wealthy, and the cottage of the poor and the lowly, and it is on behalf of all these classes that I make this solemn appeal.

Angels