Quotes about death
page 43

“He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), pp. 39–40

“Free speech means being able to express an honest opinion—in case you didn't know—and my honest opinion is that Wahhabi Islam is such an obvious mental affliction, that science ought to be looking for a cure. It's a truly horrible, heartless and cruel ideology that despises human kind, especially the female half, and I believe its presence on this planet is a stain on all humanity; and when it finally passes, as one day it surely must, because nothing that unnatural and inhuman could possibly last forever, its memory will linger like a bad smell, as a warning for generations to come; like a ghostly gibbet by the roadside of history, a bony finger of death, beckoning us back to a more brutal and primitive past. It'll serve as a grim reminder of what happens to human beings when religion is allowed to go too far.”

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

"Can I say this?" (27 May 2012) http://youtube.com/watch?v=nlhxadPHt4s · transcript http://dotsub.com/view/d1843b5a-19d8-4bd0-8e91-2b84ee780b61/viewTranscript/eng 2012

Religion, History, Affliction, Memory

“Some of the colonizers do understand and quickly retreat, while some, because they are stupid, continue colonizing others, increasing the suffering, deaths, injuries, defeat and humiliation. The people colonized by Abyssinia will be free. Eritrea will be free, and they cannot refuse to let them be free. Western Somalia will be free, and they cannot refuse to grant it freedom. The numerous Abo will be free because this is history, and no one can prevent the sunshine from reaching us.”

Siad Barre (1919–1995) Head of State of Somalia

Mogadiscio Domestic Service in Somali http://www.biyokulule.com/1978_coup.htm, 0448 GMT (1 May 1978).

People, Stupidity, History, Understanding

“And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section VII, p 190 The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

Men, Decision

“By the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one constant of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive sense of self-consciousness that sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock 'n' roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about fifteen stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country! So we loved and loved and doted on ourselves and our reflections in each other even as the whole thing got out of hand and turned into mud and disaster areas and downs and death.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"James Taylor Marked for Death" (1971), p. 66
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Love, Sense, Time, Country

“The great world to which I am native has long ago outgrown the myths, the toys, the bogies of your infant world. There, one lives without the fear of death and pain, though there one dies and suffers. There, one knows no lust to triumph over other men, no fear of being enslaved. There one loves without craving to possess, worships without thought of salvation, contemplates without pride of spirit. There one is free as none in your world is free, yet obedient as none of you is obedient.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter IX: On Earth and On Neptune.

Love, Men, Pain, World

“In Mongolia has been discovered a mass grave containing the remains of thousands of Buddhist monks liquidated by a former communist regime. An 83-old man, once head of an extermination squad, admitted that he personally put 15,724 to death. 1197-at-Nalanda was repeated not by invading Muslim armies but by local communist revolutionaries and social transformers.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Quoted from the preface by Ram Swarup in Gurbachan, S. T. S., & Swarup, R. (1991). Muslim League attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947.

Personality

“There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

RAFTS https://web.archive.org/web/20060621091445/http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000132.html (18 June 2006) 2000s

People, Books, World, Search

“Death is an angel with two faces:
To us he turns
A face of terror, blighting all things fair;
The other burns
With glory of the stars, and love is there.”

Theodore Chickering Williams (1855–1915) American hymnwriter

A Thanatopsis, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love, Angels, Star

“Just as what is in the jar, when broken, becomes one with the surroundings, death offers the opportunity to recognize the basic truth of all existence through non-discriminating one-pointedness. Like space, the essence of mind is unaffected by transition and death.”

Lama Ole Nydahl (1941) Danish lama

Fearless Death: Buddhist Wisdom on the Art of Dying (2012)

Truth

“Able to save to the uttermost, "Lord to whom shall we go; Thou hast the words of eternal life?" Thou who hast abolished death, upon whom else shall we suspend our immortality?”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 231.

Life

“The absolute morality that the religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath; these are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought-out, reasoned, argued, discussed—based upon, almost say—intelligent design. Can we not design our society which has the sort of morality, the sort of society we want to live in?”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Dawkins on Q&A (), replying to a Muslim man who asked about 'absolute morality'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu7AQTs_y5A

People, Intelligence, Thinking, Personality

“A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour, and survival a thing beyond the bounds of possibility.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Themes and Variations (1950)

Hell, Knowledge

“From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings and wanderings, had been in this man: What am I? What is this unfathomable Thing I live in, which men name Universe? What is Life; what is Death? What am I to believe? What am I to do? The grim rocks of Mount Hara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes answered not. The great Heaven rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars, answered not. There was no answer. The man's own soul, and what of God's inspiration dwelt there, had to answer!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Life, Men, God, Soul

“I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

First lines
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

World, Dreams, Learning

“Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be;
Yet oh, how dear it is to us, this life we live and see!”

Mary Mapes Dodge (1831–1905) Children's writer, novelist, poet, editor

The Two Mysteries (1904).

Life

“We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Detachment (1947), p. 260

“In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.
One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), X

Life, Women, Men, Truth

“One can become overwhelmed on vacation—I have become so—by thinking thoughts that are too large. There is a condition identified in psychology textbooks as the Stendhal syndrome, also called, or related to, the Jerusalem syndrome, that describes a tourist’s overwhelmed response to great works of art or to a sudden apprehension of scale, antiquity, multitude, death—the accompanying fear is of one’s insignificance, but also of squandered opportunity.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Fear, Art, Thinking

“By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all [Presidents] was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

I'm a Stranger Here Myself (US), Notes From a Big Country (UK) (1998)

Universe, Country

“This is Harvey Milk speaking from the camera store on the evening of Friday, November 18. This is to be played only in the event of my death by assassination. I fully realize that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, a gay activist, becomes a target or the potential target for somebody who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbed themselves. Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment, any time, I feel it's important that some people know my thoughts. And so the following are my thoughts, my wishes, and my desires, whatever, and I'd like to pass them on and have them played for the appropriate people.”

Harvey Milk (1930–1978) American politician who became a martyr in the gay community

From a tape recording (1977-11-18) to be played in the event of his assassination, quoted in Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982, ISBN 0-31256-085-0), p. 275

People, Feeling, Time, Personality

“For we know the clod, by the grace of God
Will quicken with voice and breath;
And we know that Love, with gentle hand
Will beckon from death to death.”

Langdon Smith Evolution

These lines just before the final four do not appear in most published versions, but were included in the version published in The Book of Poetry (1927) edited by Edwin Markham. It is not known whether they existed in the second newspaper publication, of which no copies are known to survive, or derived from manuscript variants.
Evolution (1895; 1909)

Love, God

“An irresistible sleep fell deeply on his eyes, the sweetest,
soundest oblivion, still as the sleep of death itself…”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XIII. 79–80 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Sleep

“This increase in the world's population represents humanity's victory against death.”

Julian Simon (1932–1998) American economist

"The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving," Cato Institute Policy Report, September/October 1995 http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/pr-so-js.html

World, Victory

“Constable, an admirable man, is one of England's glories. I have already told you about him and about the impression he had made on me when I was making 'The massacre at Chios'. He and Turner were real reformers. They broke out of the rut of traditional landscape painting. Our School [ French Romanticism ], which today abounds in men of talent in this field, profited greatly by their example. Géricault [first leader of French Romanticism, followed by Delacroix after his early death] came back in a daze from seeing one of the great landscapes Constable sent us.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote from Delacroix' letter to Théophile Silvestre, Paris, 31 December 1858; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863, ed. and translation Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 352
1831 - 1863

Men, School, Painting

“I am more and more engrossed with the single poetic theme of Life and Death, for there doesn't seem to be any question more directly relevant than this one of what survives of all the beloved.”

Alun Lewis (1915–1944) Welsh poet

Letter written in 1943; cited from Jeremy Hooker and Gweno Lewis (eds.) Selected Poems of Alun Lewis (London: Unwin, 1987) p. 108.

Life, Question

“The Dead! the Dead! and sleep they here,
The lost of other years —
The Dead! the Dead! can they be here,
Where nought of Death appears?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(7th October 1826) The Tumuli
The London Literary Gazette, 1826

Sleep, Appearance, Dead

“Since the Persian monarchy began some 2550 years ago, Iran has had more than 350 kings. No fewer than half of them were either assassinated or killed in battle. Many went into exile to escape death. Iran's long history is full of fallen crowns and shattered imperial dreams. Of Mohammad-Reza Shah's five immediate predecessors, one was assassinated and three were forced into exile. What makes Mohammad-Reza Shah's tragedy special is that he was, perhaps, the first Iranian king in more than a century to have a real possibility of ending his reign peacefully and dying in his own country. That this was not the case was, to a large extent, the result of Iran's chronic political underdevelopment. But the Shah's own failure to operate within the realities of Iranian society - unpleasant as they undoubtedly were - contributed to his downfall and its dramatic consequences for the nation as a whole. The fall of the Shah was, in a since, the prelude to more than a decade of instability in the region, culminating in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent massacre of Kurds and shi'ites in Mesopotamia. It may take Iran and her region many more years before the shockwaves unleashed by the fall of the Shah are fully absorbed.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

Dreams, History, Failure, Reality

“The bones of Cambodia, and the millions who risked death to flee communist Vietnam and Laos for an uncertain life anywhere else, tells us about the moral value, though not necessarily the military tactical wisdom, of the anti-communist cause.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Life, Wisdom

“And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
'My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.”

Wilfred Owen The End

The End

Tear, Heart, Sea

“There's no such word, though there should be, as "adeism" or as being an "adeist", but if there was one I would say that's what I was. I don't believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn't prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There's no reason at all why this entity isn't completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism - except by a series of extraordinarily generous (to yourself) assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Lane Craig, 04/04/2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8&t=42m38s 2000s, 2009

Life, Sex, Nature, Indifference

“Putin’s proxy army was almost certainly guilty of killing the passengers on the Malaysia Airlines jet that came down in eastern Ukraine. He has questions to answer about the death of Alexander Litvinenko, pitilessly poisoned in a London restaurant. As for his reign in Moscow, he is allegedly the linchpin of a vast post-Soviet gangster kleptocracy, and is personally said to be the richest man on the planet. Journalists who oppose him get shot. His rivals find themselves locked up. Despite looking a bit like Dobby the House Elf, he is a ruthless and manipulative tyrant.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

"Let’s deal with the Devil: we should work with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/12036184/Lets-deal-with-the-Devil-we-should-work-with-Vladimir-Putin-and-Bashar-al-Assad-in-Syria.html, The Telegraph (05 Dec 2015) 2010s, 2015

Question, Housing, Personality

“I approached the confines of death, and having trod on the threshold of Proserpine, I returned therefrom, being borne through all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining with its brilliant light; and I approached the presence of the Gods beneath, and the Gods of heaven, and stood near, and worshipped them.”
Accessi confinium mortis et calcato Proserpinae limine per omnia vectus elementa remeavi, nocte media vidi solem candido coruscantem lumine, deos inferos et deos superos accessi coram et adoravi de proximo.

Apuleius book The Golden Ass

Bk. 11, ch. 23; pp. 239-40.
Describing initiation into the mysteries of Isis.
Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass)

God, Light, Sun

“If a gentleman, or an inferior thane, killed a stag in the king's forests, he was degraded from his rank; if a ceorl, or husbandman, committed the same offence, he was reduced to slavery; and if a slave killed one, he suffered death. Magistrates were appointed, in every county, or shire, to put these laws in execution, and under them were appointed inferior officers or gamekeepers, whose province it was to apprehend the offenders.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 9
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Hunting

Law, Suffering

“Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same. It does not end when jetliners are used as bombs to decimate skyscrapers, nor does it end when a father shoots to death his adolescent son and daughter. Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease. It is, after all, not only nations and communities that need peace so desperately but individuals divided against other individuals and within themselves.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(p. 257, The American Poet Who Went Home Again).
Book Sources, The American Poet Who Went Home Again (2008)

Peace, Hope, Communication, Daughters

“Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Lullaby (2002)

Love, Life, Hate, Marriage

“Let me tell you, world,
I—do—not—believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number one thousand and one.I don't believe the sky is blue:
I don't believe in thunder's echoes;
I don't believe that dreams are false:
I don't believe that death has no revenge.”

Bei Dao (1949) contemporary Chinese (PRC) avant garde poet

"The Answer" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50088/the-answer-56d22cd8d69d0, p. 33 The August Sleepwalker (1990)

Lie, World, Dreams, Revenge

“War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here, you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won't even see it.”

Pierce Brown book Golden Son

Source: Golden Son (2015), Ch. 38: The Iron Rain

Men, War, Fear, Silence

“It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=03-633 (1 March 2005).

Penalty

“O. K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed "The Mau Maus of East Harlem," and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: "He was promising…").”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"An Instant Fan's Inspired Notes: You Gotta Listen" (1980), from Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000, ed. Peter Guralnick (Da Capo Press, 2000, ISBN 0306809990), p. 100

Love, Music

“[T]his film offers a nightmare image: the "Black Rebels," an outlaw motorcycle gang — a leather-jacketed pack who resemble storm troopers — terrorize a town. Their emblem is a death's head and crossed pistons and rods, and Marlon Brando, in his magnetic, soft-eyed youth, is their moody leader. The picture seemed to be frightened of its subject — the young nihilists who say "no" to American blandness and conformity — and reduced it as quickly as possible to the trivial meaninglessness of misunderstood boy meets understanding girl (Mary Murphy), but the audience savored the possibilities, and this clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"The Wild One," p. 838.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Youth, Girl, Boy, Understanding

“Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?… Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?… Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population! The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework… Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED. The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing `pure' civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but `morally corrupt') kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.”

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) British anthropologist

Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.

Life, Way, Imagination, History

“(On the prospect of Thatcher's death) Be serious - this is just a fantasy, because if she were killed, would it actually make any difference? Would things get any better? Course they wouldn't; don't kid yourself. They'd get worse, because she would become a martyr – this monetarist martyr - a cult figure, like Eva Peron. Can you imagine the televised funeral? There she'd be, laid out in a glass coffin, in the blue gear, the hair-do and all the rest of it. She'd be laying there just really life-like - just like she was in life - a bit warmer. It would be on the telly. You thought Winston Churchill was bad; you can imagine what this would be like. And then, of course, it wouldn't stop at that. There would be films - The Night Brighton Rocked. There'd be musicals. Tim Rice would be churning out the musicals about her life - Magita. There'd be Elaine Page belting out the big numbers: 'Don't Cry for Me, Barnet Finchley”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Token Women, 1984
Stand-up

Life, Women, Music, Imagination

“The very dogs were all asleep, and the flies, drunk with moist sugar in the grocer’s shop, forgot their wings and briskness, and baked to death in dusty corners of the window.”

Charles Dickens book The Old Curiosity Shop

Source: The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Ch. 27

Dogs

“What I did was restate the law. I was talking about a situation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes smashing into a house, doesn't say who they are, and their guns are out, they're shooting, and they're in the wrong place. This has happened time and time again. The ATF has gone in and gotten the wrong guy in the wrong place. The law is that if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed so your kinfolk can have a wrongful death action. You are legally entitled to defend yourself and I was speaking of exactly those kind of situations. If you're going to do that, you should know that they're wearing body armor so you should use a head shot. Now all I'm doing is stating the law, but all the nuances in there got left out when the story got repeated.”

G. Gordon Liddy (1930) American lawyer in Watergate scandal

On his 1994 comments on taking head shots at ATF agents, as quoted in a 2003 interview at Right Wing News http://www.rightwingnews.com/interviews/liddy.php

Alcohol, Law, Guy, Time

“It was only now that they realized that there is nothing that can really be a preparation for death.”

Jo Walton book Tooth and Claw

Source: Tooth and Claw (2003), Chapter 2, section 7 (p. 29)

“Sleep is a death; oh, make me try
By sleeping what it is to die,
And as gently lay my head
On my grave as now my bed.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 12
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

Sleep

“I don't mean that it is important whether a few of us like Goering, myself, or the others are sentenced to death or hard labor or whatever, but to the German people we will always remain their leaders, right or wrong, and in a few years even you Americans and the rest of the world will see this trial as a mistake. The German people will learn to hate the Americans, distrust the British and French, and unfortunately, perhaps be taken in by the Russians. That will be the worst calamity of all. I hate to think of Moscow ruling Germany or Germany becoming a territorial possession of the Soviet Union. The Allies should take the attitude, now that the war is over, that mistakes have been made on both sides, that those of us here on trial are German patriots, and that though we may have been misled and gone too far with Hitler, we did it in good faith and as German citizens. Furthermore, the German people will always regard our condemnation by a foreign court as unjust and will consider us martyrs.”

Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, June 23, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Hate, War, People, World

“Siward, the stalwart earl, being stricken by dysentery, felt that death was near, and said, "How shameful it is that I, who could not die in so many battles, should have been saved for the ignominious death of a cow! At least clothe me in my impenetrable breastplate, gird me with my sword, place my helmet on my head, my shield in my left hand, my gilded battle-axe in my right, that I, the bravest of soldiers, may die like a soldier." He spoke, and armed as he had requested, he gave up his spirit with honour.”
Siwardus, consul rigidissimus, pro fluuio uentris ductus mortem sensit imminere. Dixitque, "Quantus pudor me tot in bellis mori non potuisse, et uaccarum morti cum dedecore reseruarer! Induite me saltem lorica mea impenetrabili, precingite gladio. Sublimate galea. Scutum in leua. Securim auratam michi ponite in dextra, ut militum fortissimus modo militis moriar." Dixerat, et ut dixerat armatus honorifice spiritum exalauit.

Henry of Huntingdon book Historia Anglorum

Siwardus, consul rigidissimus, pro fluuio uentris ductus mortem sensit imminere. Dixitque, "Quantus pudor me tot in bellis mori non potuisse, et uaccarum morti cum dedecore reseruarer! Induite me saltem lorica mea impenetrabili, precingite gladio. Sublimate galea. Scutum in leua. Securim auratam michi ponite in dextra, ut militum fortissimus modo militis moriar."
Dixerat, et ut dixerat armatus honorifice spiritum exalauit.
Book VI, §24, pp. 378-81.
Historia Anglorum (The History of the English People)

Clothes

“Thus, it is established that Adam is the human race, by whatever names he was called. Since it is clear that he became manifest in the form of a man, naturally on every plane he is fallible. But God is not his partner in any errors. For, he taught him beauty and ugliness and truth and falsehood, and he learned good and evil. But his kingship is a result of the divine decree. And if he remains continually in his position or steps down, or is deposed from it, in each case it is the result of the divine decree. His cause is exalted with God. Whenever he is a temporal ruler, his leadership is like that of any other. If he is among the prophets, his commands and prohibitions are from God, and his kingship is by God’s command, and he is the leader of the people as long as he lives. After their deaths, some hold that they must continue to be obeyed, and others mention them with their lips, and love for them is continual.”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Treatise on Kingship

Love, God, People, Truth

“The men of my group who are under indictment here were under my military command. If they had not executed the orders which they were given, they would have been ordered by me to execute them. If they had refused to execute the orders they would have had to be called to account for it by me. There could be no doubt about it. Whoever refused anything in the front lines would have met immediate death. If the refusal would have come about in any other way, a court martial of the Higher SS and Police Leader would have brought about the same consequences.”

Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general

At the Nuremberg Trials. Quoted in "Valhalla's Warriors: A History of the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front" - Page 186 - by Terry Goldsworthy - History - 2007.

Men, Way

“Somehow for me these common tunes
Can never sound the same again:
They've magic now to thrill my heart
And bring before me, clear and plain,
Man that is master of his flesh,
And has the laugh of death and pain.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, In A Soldiers' Hospital II: Gramophone Tunes

Pain, Heart

“We are still very much annoyed by out-of-date notions of time. Please, would you throw away your watches! At least toss aside the minutes and hours. Obviously we all realize that we are not everlasting. Our fear of death has inspired the creation of beautiful works of art. And this was a fine thing, too. However, our only eternal possession will be change.”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

reprinted in 'Zero', ed. Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press 1973, p. 120
Quotes, 1960's, untitled statements in 'Zero 3', (1961)

Fear, Beauty, Art, Change

“[T]he hallmarks of Lincoln's greatness were his ability to grow and his willingness to change his mind. During the war, he had come to embrace the Radical position on immediate emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers. In 1864 he privately suggested to Governor Hahn that Louisiana allow some blacks to vote under its new constitution, singling out the educated, propertied free blacks of New Orleans and those who had served in the Union army. In April 1865, shortly before his death, Lincoln for the first time publicly stated his support for this kind of limited black suffrage.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

2000s, If Lincoln Hadn't Died (2009)

War, Education, Support, Change

“I've just finished reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, that is, I've read and understood them for the first time. One passionate, desolate lament - immeasurable and inconsolable - for the waning, wasting and passing of beauty. At the same time there's something disturbingly un-Christian here - the utterly heathen, desperate keening of the dirges, the grisly dances of death, danses macabres, in which death is nothing but the end, finality - destruction, not transition.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 38 Diaries 1951

Beauty, Passion, Time, Reading

“But we, the great, the valiant, and the wise,
When once the seal of death has closed our eyes,
Lost in the hollow tomb obscure and deep,
Slumber, to wake no more, one long unbroken sleep!”

Moschus Ancient Greek poet

'The Epitaph on Bion', tr. R. Polwhele, lines 129–132
The Idylliums of Moschus, Idyllium III

Sleep

“Do you think I take any pleasure in this dog's life, in seeing and causing death in people unknown to me, in losing friends and acquaintances daily, in seeing my reputation ceaselessly exposed to the caprices of fortune, in spending the whole year with uneasiness and apprehension, in continually risking my life and my fortune? I certainly know the value of tranquility, the charms of society, the pleasures of life, and I like to be happy as much as anybody. Although I desire all these good things, I will not buy them with baseness and infamy. Philosophy teaches us to do our duty, to serve our country faithfully at the expense of our blood and of our repose, to commit our whole being to it.”

Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) king of Prussia

Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington, letter 141 from Frederick to Voltaire (1759-07-02)

Life, Happiness, People, Pleasure

“Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive.”

Richard Eberhart (1904–2005) American poet

Quoted in his obituary Dartmouth College news release http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/06/10.html Other

Way, Feeling, Heart

“Now, on the contrary, when every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. […] His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 108
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“If you're up against a smart opponent, make him think himself to death.”

C. J. Cherryh (1942) United States science fiction and fantasy author

Chanur's Legacy (1992)

Thinking

“England must…have the mask of Christian peaceableness torn publicly off her face…Our consuls in Turkey and India, agents, etc., must inflame the whole Mohammedan world to wild revolt against this hateful, lying, conscienceless people of hagglers; for if we are to be bled to death, at least England shall lose India.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Marginal note in a telegram from the German ambassador in St Petersburg, Count Friedrich von Pourtalès (30 July 1914), quoted in Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1967), p. 121
1910s

Hate, People, World, Lying

“In the black sky no star is seen,
somewhere in ambush lurks the Angel of Death,
but the spices tongues of the masqueraders
are loose and shameless
A shout:
"Make way for the hero!"
Ah yes. Displacing the tall one,
he will step forth now without fail
and sing to us about holy vengeance…”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

Angels, Way, Star, Singing

“My true single consolation is that she is not present to see me in my agony of her death.”

Albert Cohen (1895–1981) Swiss writer

Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954)

“Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Notes, p. 262.
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)

Life, Understanding

“When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor, are signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible certainty. How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion of former caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and melancholy problem of the birth and death of love.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 5 "Countess Steno"

Love, Lovers, Birth, Problem

“He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.”

Stephen Crane book The Red Badge of Courage

Source: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ch. 24

“There is a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us out flat some time or other.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 10.

Time

“An examination of history proves that in Christian Russia as in Christian England the husband could release himself from the marriage bond by killing his wife, over whom under Christian law he had power of life and death. Her children, as to-day in Christian England and America, are not under her control; she is to bear children but not to educate them, for as under Catholic and Protestant Christianity, women are looked upon as a lower order of beings, of an unclean nature.”

Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) American abolitionist, writer

Source: Woman, Church and State (1893), pp. 380-381

Life, Women, Marriage, Children

“I am receiving what I suppose to be the usual number of threatening letters on the subject. Assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning; it is best not to worry about either.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

As quoted in Garfield of Ohio : The Available Man (1970) by John M. Tyler

“This is kind of complex, because Jesus did identify with the victims. But Jesus was not a victim. He was a conqueror…Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life…. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would’ve come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did. That’s an abomination.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Glenn Beck
Television
Fox News
2010-07-13
00:06:00
Glenn Beck: Jews Killed Jesus
2010-07-13
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/15/glenn-beck-jews-killed-je_n_648134.html
2010s, 2010

Life, Dead

“On him does death lie heavily, who, but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.”
Illi mors gravis incubat Qui notus nimis omnibus Ignotus moritur sibi

Seneca the Younger Thyestes

Illi mors gravis incubat
Qui notus nimis omnibus
Ignotus moritur sibi
Thyestes, lines 401-403; (Chorus).
Alternate translation: Death weighs on him who is known to all, but dies unknown to himself. (The Philisophical Life by James Miller).
Tragedies

Lie

“So the stimulus didn't just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Money, Tree

“Love! Beyond measure — beyond death — it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Beyond (1917)

Love

“Best contemporaneous estimates place the number of Armenians who died in the war and its aftermath at between 150,000 and 600,000. The Armenian death count climbed to 1.5 million over the years on the back of political clout and propaganda.”

Bruce Fein (1947) American lawyer

Armenian crime amnesia? (2007)

War

“We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

LOVE (1972)

Love, Madness

“The concept of ideographic writing is a most seductive notion. There is great appeal in the concept of written symbols conveying their message directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech. And it seems so plausible. Surely ideas immediately pop into our minds when we see a road sign, a death's head label on a bottle of medicine, a number on a clock. Aren't Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without regard to sound? Aren't they an ideographic system of writing? The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing… Here I would go further: There never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic system of writing.”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 133) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

Idea, Question

“But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship. All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close—a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy; "friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner, the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials; even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 2, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
On Roman Friendship in the last ages of the Republic.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Life, Friendship, War, Age

“A lethargy of sleep,
Most like to death, so calm, so deep.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book VI, p. 209

Sleep

“Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

On a panel at Odyssey Con 2008 (April 2008)

“Once you've taken a public stand you know is right, never back down; anything less than a rock-hard stance will let your enemies nibble you to death.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Some New Tactical Reflections".

“If this were true, the population of the world would be at a stand-still. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem should read: “Every moment dies a man, every moment 1 1/16 is born.” Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

New Scientist, 4 December 1958, pg.1428.
Comment in response to Alfred Tennyson’s poem Vision of Sin, which included the line Every moment dies a man, // every moment one is born.

Truth, World, Birth, Reading

“The education of Peter III was undermined by a clash of unfortunate circumstances. I will relate what I have seen and heard, and that in itself will clarify many things. I saw Peter III for the first time when he was eleven years old, in Eutin at the home of his guardian, the Prince Bishop of Lübeck. Some months after the death of Duke Karl Friedrich, Peter III’s father, the Prince Bishop had in 1739 assembled all of his family at his home in Eutin to have his ward brought there. My grandmother, mother of the Prince Bishop, and my mother, sister of this same Prince, had come there from Hamburg with me. I was ten years old at the time…. It was then that I heard it said among this assembled family that the young duke was inclined to drink, that his attendants found it difficult to prevent him from getting drunk at meals, that he was restive and hotheaded, did not like his attendants and especially Brümmer, and that otherwise he showed vivacity, but had a delicate and sickly appearance. In truth, his face was pale in color and he seemed to be thin and of a delicate constitution. His attendants wanted to give this child the appearance of a mature man, and to this end they hampered and restrained him, which could only inculcate falseness in his conduct as well as his character.”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Memoirs

Truth, Education, Family, Color

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Women, World, Education, Disease

“Under the same circumstances — and the key words are "the same circumstances" — yes, I would do it again. We were in a war for five years. We were fighting an enemy that had a reputation for never surrendering, never accepting defeat. It's really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence. In a war, there are so many questionable things done. Where was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan Death March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor? I believe that when you're in a war, a nation must have the courage to do what it must to win the war with a minimum loss of lives.”

Theodore Van Kirk (1921–2014) Recipient of the Silver Star

As quoted in "HIROSHIMA - Enola Gay's Crew Recalls The Flight Into a New Era" https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/06/world/hiroshima-enola-gay-s-crew-recalls-the-flight-into-a-new-era.html?pagewanted=all (1995), The New York Times

War, Courage, Question, Loss

“Could the Aboriginal and the British cultures have been reconciled when they first met? The prevailing view is that they could have signed a treaty and found a way of living together in relative harmony. I am not persuaded. The two confronting cultures, whether first living side by side at Sydney in 1788 or at Perth in 1829, had little in common except that they were the product of human beings. Their languages and religions differed. Their attitude to marriage, family, property and individual wealth, their economic and political systems, their way of fighting, and their thoughts about life and death, were far apart. In the world today no two cultures are so far apart as those that lived side by side in many Australian regions after 1788. Mecca and Washington today have far more in common than did the paternal Governor Phillip and the Aborigines whom he met in Sydney in 1788.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"Geoffrey Blainey: I can see parts of our history with fresh eyes," The Australian (February 21, 2015)

Life, Marriage, World, Family

“Those who look for death have to wait patiently till death finds those who look.”

Edmund Cooper book Five to Twelve

Five to Twelve (1968)

Waiting

“It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

Broadcast from Buchenwald (1945)

Men, God, Boy, Appearance

“Her cabin’d, ample Spirit,
It flutter’d and fail’d for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
The vasty Hall of Death.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"Requiescat" (1853), st. 4

Night

“The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book I, Ch. 20
Essais (1595), Book I

Life, Birth

“There is a deep impression of awe produced by such a vast but silent crowd; we are at once conscious that the cause is terrible which can induce the unusual stillness. The issue of a trial on which hangs life or death, is indeed an appalling thing. We know that men are about to take away that which they cannot give—that a few words of human breath will deprive of breath one of the number for ever; and though we acknowledge that in this evil world punishment is the only security against crime, and that blood for blood has been a necessity from the beginning of time; still, we feel that the necessity is a dreadful one.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Life, Men, World, Feeling

“And death?
I don’t fear death.
I dread the absence of it.”

Robert Charles Wilson (1953) author

Divided by Infinity (p. 195)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Fear

“When people ask me why I don’t eat meat or any other animal products, I say because they are unhealthy and they are the product of a violent and inhumane industry. Chickens, cows, and pigs in factory farms spend their whole lives in filthy, cramped conditions only to die a prolonged and painful death.”

Casey Affleck (1975) American actor

From a PETA video (6 February 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSuLrvwLoLA, reported in "Casey Affleck’s ‘Go Vegan’ PSA", in peta2.com http://www.peta2.com/heroes/casey-afflecks-go-vegan-psa/.

Pain, People, Animals

“History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. It is the enemy of subjectivity, which is why Stephen Dedalus called it "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history. which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (1964), p. 13-14

Men, Way, History, Thinking

“All in all he had not done badly out of the war, but the smells of it, the sights of it, and the cries of pain that attended it like the vultures, had sickened and soured him. Yes, he could fight well enough. And kill efficiently. He feared death, like other men, but could put that from his mind in battle, and he was no fool with a sword or knife. But several smoking ruins ago there had come a curious shift inside himself. He had lost his sense of purpose in the war; he supposed because it was not truly his own purpose but that of the King.”

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Source: Short fiction, Companions on the Road (1975), Chapter 1, “Avillis” (p. 4)

Men, Pain, War, Fear

“Golf is such a wonderful game, I love it to death.”

Charlie Sifford (1922–2015) professional golfer

Charlie Sifford hailed by Tiger Woods and others for breaking golf barriers https://www.pga.com/news/pga/charlie-sifford-hailed-tiger-woods-and-others-breaking-golf-barriers by The Associated Press (November 18, 2014)

Love, Game

“The dead are friends whom death is powerless to take from us. Great writers are immortal companions who can embellish our old age as they enchanted our young days. Music, too, is an extraordinarily faithful friend. To those of us who have lost our faith in human nature, it offers refuge in other pleasant worlds.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Age, World, Faith, Music

“Why do we resist giving help to homeless men? In part because we don’t understand how our pressure on men to support families often forces men to take transient jobs that are but a step away from homelessness (the death-of-a-salesman jobs, the migrant worker jobs…) and in part because we respond differently to men who fail”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

than women who fail
Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 209.

Women, Men, Family, Understanding

“One sweet whisper from her came;
And he drank to catch her breath, —
Wine and sigh alike are death!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1836-3) (Vol.48) Subjects for Pictures. Second Series. II. A Supper of Madame de Brinvilliers
The Monthly Magazine

Wine

“A vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Isreal.”

Joe the Plumber (1973) American conservative activist and commentator

Though Wurzelbacher agreed with a statement first made to him by an elderly audience member during a press appearance: "A vote for Obama is a vote for the death to Isreal, I'll guarantee you that.", he did not actually say it himself, but did reply, "You know what? I'll actually go ahead and agree with you on that one." - YouTube video including the statement in Columbus, Ohio (28 October 2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71iNvPQXuk0 Misattributed

“We need to believe something, and you’re not allowed to believe in religion… Well, you can, but people will laugh at you and throw things. ‘Cause it was just sort of decided in the 20th century that religion is basically a formalized panic about death. Look at the Catholic church, the campest organization on the planet with the purple robes, gold bits on the side, jewellery so big if they let it fall it would kill people… What else can it be, but this sort of ritual of panic about death? “DEATH IS COMING! Quick, put on the gold hat!””

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

What It Is (2009)

People, Religion

Quotes about death page 43

Related topics

Quotes about death
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