Quotes about death
page 28

Norman Mailer photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“Don't be afraid. The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find.”

Yes, he thought, the good face pain. But the great—they embrace it.

Aftermaths (p. 253)
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)

Poul Anderson photo
Ludovico Ariosto photo

“No man can know by whom he's truly loved
When high on Fortune's wheel he sits, serene.
His friends surround him, true and false, unproved,
And the same loyalty in all is seen.
When to catastrophe the wheel is moved
The crowd of flatterers passes from the scene;
But he who loves his lord with all his heart
Remains, nor after death does he depart.”

Alcun non può saper da chi sia amato,
Quando felice in su la ruota siede:
Però c'ha i veri e i finti amici a lato,
Che mostran tutti una medesma fede.
Se poi si cangia in tristo il lieto stato,
Volta la turba adulatrice il piede;
E quel che di cor ama riman forte,
Ed ama il suo signor dopo la morte.
Canto XIX, stanza 1 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Woody Allen photo

“My relationship with death remains the same - I'm strongly against it,
All I can do is wait for it”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Ibid. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8684809.stm

Eric Holder photo
José Rizal photo
Erik Naggum photo

“Intellectual laziness is punishable by brain death. It is a natural law.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Usenet signatures

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
William Cobbett photo

“Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Letter (10 February 1804).

George Gordon Byron photo

“The love where Death has set his seal,
Nor age can chill, nor rival steal,
Nor falsehood disavow.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

And Thou Art Dead as Young and Fair http://readytogoebooks.com/LB-thou38.html (1812).

Wilhelm II, German Emperor photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Pat Condell photo

“It's often claimed that many people in the West are converting to Islam, and it's true that some are, but it's also true that many Muslims in the West are leaving Islam, but you don't hear so much about them for obvious reasons. Some of them have been brave enough to make themselves known, and reach out to help other Muslims who want to escape the tyranny of their religion, and, like them, it's the religion I have a problem with, not the people. So no, I don't hate Muslims — thanks for asking — I wish them well. Even the fanatics who stand at the roadside with their dopey little banners and bulging eyeballs, calling for death to the West — I even wish those boneheads well, in that I wish them good mental health, if that isn't too wildly optimistic. And of course I know that there are lots of moderate, peaceful Muslims. Indeed, many of them are so moderate and peaceful, they're invisible and silent, and that is part of the problem. And just because there are lots of peaceful Muslims, it doesn't mean the religion itself is not an aggressive, fascist ideology that threatens all our freedoms, nor does it mean that western governments aren't falling over themselves to make excuses for it, pretending that Islam has nothing to do with the violence inspired and sanctioned by its scripture, and repeatedly carried out in its name.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

The Enemy Within http://youtube.com/watch?v=NUiysSau8Qk (18 July 2010)]
2010

Howard Dean photo
Francis Quarles photo

“Death aims with fouler spite
At fairer marks.”

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) English poet

Divine Poems (ed. 1669). Compare: "Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow", Edward Young, Night Thoughts, night v. line 1011.

Charlotte Brontë photo
Alphonse de Lamartine photo
Irenaeus photo

“The business of the Christian is nothing else than to be ever preparing for death”

Irenaeus (130–202) Bishop and saint

Fragment XI
Fragments

Chinua Achebe photo
Dan Aykroyd photo

“Greetings and death to our enemies.”

Dan Aykroyd (1952) Canadian film actor

Comment to reporters at a press junket in November 2004 for his movie Christmas With the Kranks
[PEOPLE:Aykroyd a man of the world, but which one?, STEVE, EDDY, Orange County Register, Santa Ana, Calif., December 2, 2004]

Grant Morrison photo

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Grover Norquist photo

“Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you're right, there's an exemption for — I don't know — maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.' And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn't come back and try and tax you again.”

Grover Norquist (1956) Conservative Lobbyist

interview with NPR's Terry Gross on the program Fresh Air, October 2, 2003.
2003

Keith Ward photo
Ferdinand Marcos photo

“We cannot and we will not negotiate with terrorists. We have nothing but contempt for them. To conciliate differences with these people without them changing their objectives is to condemn our Republic to ultimate strangulation and death.”

Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) former President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986

Extemporaneous remarks during the Meeting with the Leaders of Regions I and II, Mansion House, Baguio City (15 March 1981)
1965

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Petula Clark photo
Bogumil Goltz photo

“What humiliation, what disgrace for us all, that it should be necessary for one man to exhort other men not to be inhuman and irrational towards their fellow-creatures! Do they recognise, then, no mind, no soul in them — have they not feeling, pleasure in existence, do they not suffer pain? Do their voices of joy and sorrow indeed fail to speak to the human heart and conscience — so that they can murder the jubilant lark, in the first joy of his spring-time, who ought to warm their hearts with sympathy, from delight in bloodshed or for their ‘sport,’ or with a horrible insensibility and recklessness only to practise their aim in shooting! Is there no soul manifest in the eyes of the living or dying animal — no expression of suffering in the eye of a deer or stag hunted to death — nothing which accuses them of murder before the avenging Eternal Justice? …. Are the souls of all other animals but man mortal, or are they essential in their organisation? Does the world-idea (Welt-Idee) pertain to them also — the soul of nature — a particle of the Divine Spirit? I know not; but I feel, and every reasonable man feels like me, it is in miserable, intolerable contradiction with our human nature, with our conscience, with our reason, with all our talk of humanity, destiny, nobility; it is in frightful (himmelschreinder) contradiction with our poetry and philosophy, with our nature and with our (pretended) love of nature, with our religion, with our teachings about benevolent design — that we bring into existence merely to kill, to maintain our own life by the destruction of other life. …. It is a frightful wrong that other species are tortured, worried, flayed, and devoured by us, in spite of the fact that we are not obliged to this by necessity; while in sinning against the defenceless and helpless, just claimants as they are upon our reasonable conscience and upon our compassion, we succeed only in brutalising ourselves. This, besides, is quite certain, that man has no real pity and compassion for his own species, so long as he is pitiless towards other races of beings.”

Bogumil Goltz (1801–1870) German humorist and satirist

Das Menschendasein in seinen weltewigen Zügen und Zeichen (1850); as quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), pp. 287-286.

Ernst Bloch photo
Amir Taheri photo
Richard Le Gallienne photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Dwight L. Moody photo
Ingrid Newkirk photo
John Ogilby photo
John Clare photo
Brigham Young photo
Dick Gregory photo
Henry Van Dyke photo
Hermann Hesse photo

“As revelation is the great strengthener of reason, the march of mind which leaves the Bible in the rear, is an advance, like that of our first parents in Paradise, towards knowledge, but, at the same time, towards death.”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 364.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Samuel Butler photo

“Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Antithesis
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IV - Memory and Design

Edward Young photo

“Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow.”

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night V, Line 1011.

H. G. Wells photo
Francis Marion Crawford photo
Joseph Campbell photo
Hermann Samuel Reimarus photo
Thomas Chatterton photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“You've got half the room going totally crazy, wild, they loved everything, they wanna do something great for our country, and you have the other side, even on positive news, really positive news, like that, they were like death, and un-American, un-American. Somebody said treasonous, I mean, yeah I guess, why not? Can we call that treason, why not?”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Speaking in Cincinnati about Democrats did not clap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjwPiE1wCU0 during his State of the Union Address (5 February 2018)
2010s, 2018, February

Orson Scott Card photo
Iain Banks photo
Keshub Chunder Sen photo
Kuruvilla Pandikattu photo

“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)

Charlotte Salomon photo

“…his book, Orpheus, or the Way to a Death Mask, of which he had said that he regretted not having written it as a poem.
And with dream-awakened eyes she saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew: she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 2th ending, written page in brush, related to JHM no. 4924v https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Charlotte_Salomon_-_JHM_4924-02.jpg: 'Life? or Theater..', p. 822
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Cat Stevens photo
Samuel Butler photo
Benjamin Franklin photo

“There is a great danger for the United States of America. This great danger is the Jew. Gentlemen, in whatever country Jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion, have built up a state within a state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country to death financially.
If you do not exclude them from the United States in the Constitution, in less than 200 years they will have swarmed here in such great numbers that they will dominate and devour the land, and change our form of government.
If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves. Jews, gentlemen, are Asiatics, let them be born where they will or how many generations they are away from Asia, they will never be otherwise.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Claimed by American Fascist William Dudley Pelley in Liberation (February 3, 1934) to have appeared in notes taken at the Constitutional Convention by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; reported as debunked in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 26-27, noting that historian Charles A. Beard conducted a thorough investigation of the attribution and found it to be false. The quote appears in no source prior to Pelley's publication, contains anachronisms, and contradicts Franklin's own financial support of the construction of a synagogue in Philadelphia. Many variations of the above have been made, including adding to "the Christian religion" the phrase "upon which this nation was founded, by objecting to its restrictions"; adding to "strangle that country to death financially" the phrase "as in the case of Spain and Portugal". See Michael Feldberg, "The Myth of Ben Franklin's Anti-Semitism, in Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History (2003), p. 134.
Misattributed

William Lane Craig photo
Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa photo
Ali Khamenei photo

“Today, you are hated throughout the world. If you don't know this, you should. The peoples burn your flag. The Islamic peoples all over the world chant: "Death to America!"”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

March 21, 2009 speech responding to American President Barack Obama's diplomatic outreach to Iran http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/2059.htm
2009

E. W. Howe photo

“Another thing which is about as sure as death and taxes, is that no man can go on bluffing indefinitely without being called.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Country Town Sayings (1911), p261.

Bill Gates photo

“The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?”

Nathaniel Tarn (1928) American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator

Nathaniel Tarn (1999) "Octavio Paz, Anthropology, and the Future of Poetry" published in: The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology (2007). p. 118.

Northrop Frye photo

“The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 230

George Herbert photo

“[ Old men go to death; death comes to young men. ]”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Rousas John Rushdoony photo

“Let us examine therefore, in summary fashion, the laws whereby a woman in Israel might obtain a divorce by death and re-marry. The laws calling for the death penalty against the man. To list these without taking time to give all the references, the Biblical references, which can be given although we dealt with many of them:
1. Adultery, 2. Rape, 3. Incest, 4. Homosexuality or sodomy, 5. Bestiality, 6. Premeditated Murder, 7. Smiting Father or Mother, 8. Death of a woman from miscarriage due to assault and battery, 9. Sacrificing children to Molech, 10. Cursing Father or Mother, 11. Kidnapping, 12. Being a wizard, 13. Being a false prophet or dreamer, 14. Apostacy, 15. Sacrificing to other Gods, 16. Refusing to follow the decision of judges, 17. Blasphemy, 18. Transgressing the Covenant.
In other words, for all these offenses, a woman gained a divorce by death. On the other hand, a divorce by death was obtainable by men because of the following death penalties cited for women: 1. Unchastity before marriage, 2. Adultery after marriage, 3. Prostituion by a priests daughter, 4. Bestiality, 5. Being a witch or a sorceress, 6. Transgressing the covenant, and 7. Incest.
Now it is obvious that that the list for men is more than twice as long. And it is obvious that some of the death penalties for men would also apply to women, as for example murder. But many of the crimes that are cited for men such as rape and kidnapping, while it is conceivable that the woman would be guilty of those it is not very likely. Those are primarily masculine offenses.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Joey Comeau photo

“DEATH TO THE CARTOON HETEROSEXUAL PARADIGM.”

Joey Comeau (1980) writer

Lockpick Pornography

Robert Jordan photo
Milkha Singh photo

“Discipline, hard work, will power…. My experience made me so hard that I wasn't even scared of death." But one story reflects his desire clearest.”

Milkha Singh (1935) Indian track and field athlete

But one story reflects his desire clearest. The 'Flying Sikh' remembers, Rohit, Brijnath, 30 July 2008, 12 July 2013, BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7532626.stm,

Alex Jones photo

“The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

"My Papa's Waltz," ll. 1-4
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Aron Ra photo
Lloyd deMause photo
Fred Shero photo

“We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games.”

Fred Shero (1925–1990) Former ice hockey player and coach

Jackson, Jim, Walking Together Forever: The Broad Street Bullies, Then and Now

Leon R. Kass photo
Francis Bacon photo
Mark Hopkins (educator) photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Michel De Montaigne photo

“Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book I, Ch. 7
Attributed

Homér photo
Dante Gabriel Rossetti photo
Robert Sheckley photo
Morris Dees photo

“Most lawyers are used to trying to win a case on some kind of technical or evidentiary ground. We had to teach them to rethink death cases. Most capital defendants are guilty.”

Morris Dees (1936) American activist

1990 Interview with Morris Dees https://www.jstor.org/stable/29759412?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents Litigation (American Bar Association)

Dinah Craik photo
Paul Joseph Watson photo
Marcus Aurelius photo
John Fante photo
Cesare Beccaria photo
Muhammad photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“Then with no throbs of fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Stanza 9
Elegy on the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, A Practiser in Physic (1783)