Quotes about death
page 47

“Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.”

George Bernard Shaw book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Chapter 82 http://books.google.com/books?id=ys13gZliXFAC (1928) <br class="br">1920s

Life, Women, Men, Fear

“In rose with petals soft as air
I bind for you the tides and fire —
the death that lives within the flower,
oh, gladly love, for you I bear.”

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) poet, critic, translator

Poem Envoi

Love, Flowers

“It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying which is terrible.”

Henry Fielding book Amelia

Book III, Ch. 4
Amelia (1751)

“Hamas is an openly genocidal, disgustingly bloodthirsty, racist Islamic death cult that brainwashes Palestinian children to be mindless Jew-killing jihadi suicide missiles. Is there something else we need to know about them? Oh yeah, they also run some hospitals.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

December 23, 2002 http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5083&only

Children, Suicide

“Gazing at those beautiful stars, Bailey realized that nothing mattered to them. All the achievements of humankind were insignificant. Love and hate, death and life, honor and dishonor, knowledge or ignorance—what did any of that matter in the face of this austere and heartless splendor?”

Pat Murphy book There and Back Again

Source: There and Back Again (1999), Chapter 10 (p. 183)

Love, Life, Hate, Beauty

“[the first ingredient of his work].. is a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Quote from Rothko's 1958 lecture at the Pratt Institute; as cited in Mark Rothko, a biography, James E. B. Breslin, University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 28
1950's

“To find anything comparable to crowds' euphoric reactions to Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. With hindsight, we can look back on those people with pity, knowing now how many of them would be led to their deaths by the man they idolized.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Idols of Crowds http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2008/09/16/idols_of_crowds/page/full, Sep 16, 2008. <br class="br">2000s

People

“Where his glowing eye−balls turn,
Thousand banners round him burn.
Where he points his purple spear,
Hasty, hasty Rout is there,
Marking with indignant eye
Fear to stop and shame to fly.
There Confusion, Terror's child,
Conflict fierce and Ruin wild,
Agony that pants for breath,
Despair and honourable Death.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

"The Triumphs of Owen. A Fragment", from Mr. Evans's Specimens of the Welch Poetry (1764)

Fear, Flying, Despair

“The Sultan then asked, "How are Hindus designated in the law, as payers of tributes or givers of tribute? The Kazi replied, "They are called payers of tribute, and when the revenue officer demands silver from them, they should tender gold. If the officer throws dirt into their mouths, they must without reluctance open their mouths to receive it. The due subordination of the zimmi is exhibited in this humble payment and by this throwing of dirt in their mouths. The glorification of Islam is a duty. God holds them in contempt, for he says, "keep them under in subjection". To keep the Hindus in abasement is especially a religious duty, because they are the most inveterate enemies of the Prophet, and because the Prophet has commanded us to slay them, plunder them, enslave them and spoil their wealth and property. No doctor but the great doctor (Hanafi), to whose school we belong, has assented to the imposition of the jizya (poll tax) on Hindus. Doctors of other schools allow no other alternative but Death or Islam.”

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Tárikh-i Firoz Sháhi, of Ziauddin Barani in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 184, chapter 15. Tárikh-i Firoz Sháhi, of Ziauddin Barani https://archive.org/stream/cu31924073036737#page/n199/mode/2up <br class="br">Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi

God, School, Law, Wealth

“In opposition to the aristocratic valuation (good = noble, beautiful, happy, favoured by the gods) the slave morality then is this: The wretched alone are the good; those who suffer and are heavy laden, the sick and the ugly, they are the only pious ones. On the other hand, you, ye noble and rich, are to all eternity the evil, the cruel, the insatiate, the ungodly, and after death the damned. Whereas noble morality was the manifestation of great self-esteem, a continual yea-saying, slave morality is a continual Nay, a Thou shall not, a negation. To the noble valuation good bad (bad = worthless) corresponds the antithesis of slave morality, good evil. And who are the evil in this morality of the oppressed? Precisely the same who in the other morality were the good.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 30-31

God, Happiness, Beauty, Suffering

“You see before you a man in his right mind
Worldly-wise and with access to death
Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies
Having sometimes even astonished the professors
Good with languages
Having travelled a great deal
Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost my best friends in the butchery
As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Calligrammes

Me voici devant tous un homme plein de sens
Connaissant la vie et de la mort ce qu'un vivant peut connaître
Ayant éprouvé les douleurs et les joies de l'amour
Ayant su quelquefois imposer ses idées
Connaissant plusieurs langages
Ayant pas mal voyagé
Ayant vu la guerre dans l'Artillerie et l'lnfanterie
Blessé à la tête trépané sous le chloroforme
Ayant perdu ses meilleurs amis dans l'effroyable lutte
Je sais d'ancien et de nouveau autant qu'un homme seul pourrait des deux savoir
"La jolie rousse" (The Pretty Redhead), line 1; p. 133.
Calligrammes (1918)

Love, Travel

““Then shall it come to pass the saying that is written,” a voice said. “Death is swallowed up. In victory.” Perhaps only Fred heard it. “Because,” the voice said, “as soon as the writing appears backward, then you know which is illusion and which is not. The confusion ends, and death, the last enemy, Substance Death, is swallowed not into the body but up—in victory. Behold, I tell you the sacred secret now: we shall not all sleep in death.””

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 13 (p. 214)

Secret, Sleep, Appearance, Victory

“Who among American heroes could meet their tests, who would be cleared by their committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal and whose motto was "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution; or Wendell Phillips, who spoke for the underprivileged everywhere and counted himself a philosophical anarchist; not Seward of the Higher Law or Sumner of racial equality. Not Lincoln, who admonished us to have malice toward none, charity for all; or Wilson, who warned that our flag was "a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty"; or Justice Holmes, who said that our Constitution is an experiment and that while that experiment is being made "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death."”

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Who is Loyal to America? (1947)

Men, God, Justice, Law

“However arid and uninviting the prospect of a History of Medicine may appear at a distance, it will be found gradually to improve, and become full of interest wonder and animation as we proceed. …The History of Medicine is …the history of the human species, uncontaminated by those civil discords and fearful atrocities, those crimes and disorders which blot the page of other histories, and stamp man, created in the image of his maker, with the visage of a fiend and the heart of a brute. The History of Medicine, on the contrary, is the history of peace and good will, of endless harmony, and unceasing philanthropy. Instead of recording the desolations of war, and the growth of immorality—the deadly effects of human passions, and the bloody triumphs of senseless ambition—her province is to note the diminution of mortal suffering; and the only triumphs which she records are those obtained over sickness, death, and Sorrow.”

Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet (1788–1856) Scottish metaphysician (1788–1856)

The History of Medicine, Surgery, and Anatomy, from the Creation of the World, to the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century (1831), Vol. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=ajBFAQAAMAAJ

War, Fear, Peace, History

“I am grateful that I have rights in the proverbial public square--but, as a practical matter, my most cherished rights are those that I possess in my bedroom and hospital room and death chamber.”

Jacob M. Appel (1973) American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic

"A Culture of Liberty" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-m-appel/a-culture-of-liberty_b_242402.html, The Huffington Post (2009-07-21)

“In the early 1960s, having just come over from the GDR, I naturally declined to summon up any sympathy for the aims and methods of the Red Army Faction [RAF]. I was impressed by the terrorists' energy, their uncompromising determination and their absolute bravery; but I could not find it in my heart to condemn the State for its harsh response. That is what States are like; and I had known other, more ruthless ones. The deaths of the terrorists, and the related events both before and after, stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my efforts to suppress it.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes for a press conference, November-December 1988 (held at Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Feb. 1989)
1980's

Business, Nature, Effort, Heart

“So she might die here—well, she could have died anywhere, so who cared where? That didn’t interest her. Life and mystery, that interested her. Perhaps she would have been keener on death and its processes if she’d had a religious side, but to her the religions of the ages were all mixed up in her head, a ceaselessly overworked agglutination of thousands of years of responding to the fears she didn’t possess.”

Justina Robson book Natural History

Source: Natural History (2003), Chapter 30 “Communication Failure” (p. 301)

Life, Age, Fear, Religion

“Death is meaningless unless it happens to someone you know.”

Bradley Denton (1958) American science fiction author

Source: Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (1991), p. 107

“A rebel is born, a rebel is dead and in his death many others come to life. This is how we get revolutionists one generation after another”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Life, Dead

“Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

St. 22.
The Wreck of the Hesperus (1842)

Christ

“But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?”

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

Richard Dawkins, From the Afterword, The Herald Scotland, (November 20, 2006) http://www.heraldscotland.com/from-the-afterword-1.836155

Dogs, Music, Mathematics, Question

“If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damned; alas; why should I be?”

John Donne book Holy Sonnets

No. 9, line 1
Holy Sonnets (1633)

Tree

“After the first death, there is no other.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

" A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Dylan_Thomas/1093", st. 4 (1946)

“Hold on. I realize — can, just, just — I realize something's happening in Ferguson, but we're talking about something important here, so can you at least split-screen the video? I realize — look, the protesters and the police are clashing again, alright? They’re clashing again. But we're talking about the dead— the death of an American”

Megyn Kelly (1970) American reporter

of an American who was beheaded, and Pete deserves his say.
After footage of Ferguson, Missouri police chasing protesters over the shooting of Michael Brown was aired while contributor Pete Hegseth spoke to her about ISIS beheading journalist James Foley.
2014-08-19
The Kelly File
Fox News, quoted in * 2014-08-21
Megyn Kelly Scolds Producers for Interrupting ISIS Discussion with Ferguson Video
Andrew Kirell
Media Matters for America
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/megyn-kelly-scolds-producers-for-interrupting-isis-discussion-with-ferguson-video/
2014-08-27

Dead

“In the twelfth year of his reign, when Edward was feasting at Windsor, where he often used to stay, his father-in-law, the traitor Godwine, was lying next to him, and said, "It has frequently been falsely reported to you, king, that I have been intent on your betrayal. But if the God of heaven is true and just, may He grant that this little piece of bread shall not pass my throat if I have ever thought of betraying you." But the true and just God heard the voice of the traitor, and in a short time he was choked by that very bread, and tasted endless death.”
Edwardus, duodecimo anno regni sui, cum pranderet apud Windlesore, ubi plurimum manere solebat, Godwinus gener suus et proditor, recumbens iuxta eum, dixit: "Sepe tibi rex falso delatum est me prodicioni tue inuigilasse. Sed si Deus celi uerax et iustus est, hoc panis frustrulum concedat ne michi guttur pertranseat, si umquam te prodere uel cogitauerim." Deus autem uerax et iustus audiuit uocem proditoris, et mox eodem pane strangulatus, mortem pregustauit eternam.

Henry of Huntingdon book Historia Anglorum

Edwardus, duodecimo anno regni sui, cum pranderet apud Windlesore, ubi plurimum manere solebat, Godwinus gener suus et proditor, recumbens iuxta eum, dixit: "Sepe tibi rex falso delatum est me prodicioni tue inuigilasse. Sed si Deus celi uerax et iustus est, hoc panis frustrulum concedat ne michi guttur pertranseat, si umquam te prodere uel cogitauerim."
Deus autem uerax et iustus audiuit uocem proditoris, et mox eodem pane strangulatus, mortem pregustauit eternam.
Book VI, §23, pp. 378-9
Historia Anglorum (The History of the English People)

God, Law, Lying, Betrayal

“And o'er them lowers destruction, high in air,
Upon those jutting crags, whose rugged sides,
Riven in fragments, and like ruins pil'd,
Seem as that giants of those ancient days
When earthborn creatures braved th' Olympic Gods,
Those of whom fable tells, had torn away
Rocks from their solid base, and with strong arm,
Parted the mountains: there the avalanche hangs,
Mighty, but tremulous; just a light breath
Will loosen it from off its airy throne;
Then down it hurls in wrath, like to the sound
Of thunder amid storms, or as the voice
Of rushing waters—death in its career.”

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

Canto I, I
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

God, Mountain, Light, Strong

“We must bear our crosses; self is the greatest of them all. If we die in part every day of our lives, we shall have but little to do on the last. O how utterly will these little daily deaths destroy the power of the final dying!”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 170.

Parting

“Death must obliterate all memories and affections and ideas and laws, or the awakening in the next world will be amid the welcomes, and loves and raptures of those who left us with tearful farewells, and with dying promises that they would wait to welcomes us when we should arrive. And so they do. Not sorrowfully, not anxiously, but lovingly, they wait to bid us welcome.”

Randolph Sinks Foster (1820–1903) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 305.

Love, World, Law, Idea

“Dear, was it really you and I?
In truth the riddle's ill to read,
So many are the deaths we die
Before we can be dead indeed.”

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) English poet, critic and editor

Source: Poems (1898), Rhymes And Rhythms, XV

Truth, Reading, Dead

“Conformity-enforcing packs of viscious children and adults gradually shape the social complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault, torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose. A collective brain may sound warm and fuzzily New Age, but one force lashing it together is abuse.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.9 The Conformity Police

Children, Age, Religion, Science

“Jesus Christ was born in a stable; He was obliged to fly into Egypt; thirty years of His life were spent in a workshop; He suffered hunger, thirst, and weariness; He was poor, despised, and miserable; He taught the doctrines of heaven, and no one would listen. The great and the wise persecuted and took Him, subjected Him to frightful torments, treated Him as a slave, and put Him to death between two malefactors, having preferred to give liberty to a robber, rather than to suffer Him to escape. Such was the life which our Lord chose; while we are horrified at any kind of humiliation, and cannot bear the slightest appearance of contempt.”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 60.

Life, Hunger, Suffering, Appearance

“Here's my throat. I carry no weapon. You could have killed me at any time, even when I knew you were my enemy. Why did you need to deceive me into trusting you first? Were you afraid that death wouldn't bother me enough, unless I felt betrayed?”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Memory Of Earth (1992)

Time

“Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

A Door in the Hive (1989), Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

“In every age a few individuals do find The Great Way. They do conquer death by regenerating and restoring their bodies to the Realm of Permanence.”

Harold W. Percival book Thinking and Destiny

Source: Thinking and Destiny (1946), Ch. 11, The Great Way, p. 699

Age, Way

“The moon was turned toward me,
Like a platter made of gold,
My death, it almost bored me,
So often was it told.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, Tender Prey (1988), Mercy

“It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.”

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

Book II, Ch. 13
Attributed

“To exist means to be something, a thing, a feeling, a thought, an idea. All existence is particular. Only being is universal, in the sense that every being is compatible with every other being. Existences clash, being – never. Existence means becoming, change, birth and death, and birth again, while in being there is silent peace.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Existence
Source: "I am That." P.62-3.

Peace, Feeling, Idea, Birth

“Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[1992Sep21.214659.22849@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

“And the Lord Juss cried aloud in his agony, "Fling me to Tartarus, deliver me to the black infernal Furies, let them blind me, seethe me in the burning lake. For so should there yet be hope. But in this horror of Nothing is neither hope nor life nor death nor sleep nor waking, for ever. For ever."”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Ch. 28 : Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, p. 427

Life, Hope, Sleep

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild (1903)

Life, Star, Joy, Perfection

“Eight years of Obama-Clinton policies have sacrificed our safety and undermined our freedom and independence. … The Obama-Clinton foreign policy has unleashed ISIS, destabilised the Middle East and put the nation of Iran — which chants Death to America — in a dominant position of regional power and, in fact, aspiring to be a dominant world power.”

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

2010s, 2016, August, Speech in Jackson, Mississippi (August 24, 2016)

World, Freedom

“Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Life, World, Evil, Change

“The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards—and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent. Words have no meaning if the views of less than 50 percent of death penalty States can constitute a national consensus. Our previous cases have required overwhelming opposition to a challenged practice, generally over a long period of time.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On executing minors: Roper v. Simmons (2005) (dissenting).
2000s

Penalty, Time

“Would you be free from the condemnation of the sins that are past, from the power of the temptations that are to come? Then take your stand on the Rock of Ages. Let death, let the grave, let the judgment come, the victory is Christ's and yours through Him.”

Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) American evangelist and publisher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 101.

Age, Past, Victory, Christ

“You know, my Dear, I never meddle in matters of Death; I always leave those Affairs to you. Women indeed are bitter bad Judges in these cases, for they are so partial to the Brave that they think every Man handsome who is going to the Camp or the Gallows.”

John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright

Mrs. Peachum, Act I, sc. iv
The Beggar's Opera (1728)

Women, Thinking

“The perception that existence exists invalidates the normal personality, as does the imminence of death.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

Advice to Clever Children (1981)

Personality

“It’s bizarre and disgusting to see much of America’s media making excuses for a bloodthirsty, openly genocidal death cult. Something is deeply wrong with journalism in this country.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

January 6, 2009 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/32367_Emerson-_Why_Does_The_New_York_Times_Love_Hamas&only

Country

“The hour of death waits for no order. Death does not even come from the front. It is ever pressing on from behind. All men know of death, but they do not expect it of a sudden, and it comes upon them unawares. So, though the dry flats extend far out, soon the tide comes and floods the beach.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

155b
Tsurezure-Gusa (Essays in Idleness)

Men, Waiting

“It tells you how to boil water. What expression to wear when you are eating eggs. How to starve. When to eat. What your first meal should be. What your last meal should be. It says more about death than eating and more about living than cooking.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Georgina and Richard
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

Water, Cooking

“I believe that fallen creatures perish, perish for ever, for only good can live, and good has not been theirs; but how durst men forge our Saviour's words "eternal death" into so horrible a meaning? And even if he did use other words, and seem to countenance such a meaning for them (and what witness have we that He did, except that of men whose ignorance or prejudice might well have interpreted these words wrongly as they did so many others?)”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Letter II
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Men

“When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.”

J. P. Donleavy book The Ginger Man

The Ginger Man (1955; New York: Delacorte Press, 1973) p. 45.

Money, Health, Food, Sex

““Are we innately aggressive?” asked Aquinas. “Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so—and I suspect that it is—then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands. The killer-ape hypothesis does not specify a fate—it lays out an agenda. Beware, the fable warns. Caution. Trouble ahead. Genocidal weapons in the hands of creatures who are bored by peace.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” said Brat.
“But the fable went unheeded. And the weapons, unchecked. And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species—a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed—creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.””

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 16, “In Which the Essential Question Is Answered and Something Very Much Like Justice Is Served” (p. 211)

Fate, Peace, Way, Star

“O Dormer, how can I behold thy fate,
And not the wonders of thy youth relate;
How can I see the gay, the brave, the young,
Fall in the cloud of war, and lie unsung!
In joys of conquest he resigns his breath,
And, filled with England's glory, smiles in death.”

Joseph Addison The Campaign

Source: The Campaign (1704), Line 309.

Fate, War, Lie, Youth

“The great pontiff took the floor to argue the case against me. I don't remember his harangue, because I was too horrified to understand such a discordant voice, and because he made his speech with a musical instrument so loud it deafened me. He had deliberately chosen a trumpet. The violence of its martial tone was supposed to make the people call for my death and to keep them from thinking rationally, as happens in our armies, where the din of trumpets and drums prevents the soldier from thinking about the importance of his life.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Life, People, Music, Understanding

“NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her.
—Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman

Way, Time

“Summer fog. It leached all color and substance from the world, leaving only grays. Lead gray tombstone gray cobweb gray ash gray snot gray dust gray corpse gray. It was unheard-of that there be fog at this time of the year, late August. So it had to be another portent — as dire a one as the death of the One-Handed Warrior. There were many who said that the fog had its origin in the supercooled ashes of the hero: each molecule of his scattered body accreting water vapor, each tiny relic drawing to itself the air's own tears to fashion this wide-spreading shroud over the Many-Colored Land.”

Julian May (1931–2017) American science fiction, fantasy, horror, science and children's writer

The Adversary (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), ISBN 0-395-34410-7, p. 19 (opening lines of chapter 1)

World, Color, Fashion, Tear

“If some speak ill of me, I will try to understand their reasons, but after my death I will certainly come to terms with it.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

Understanding

“How sweet! You still believe in death… that's just so… quaint. Well, sorry to pop your death bubble, but there's no such thing. So make the best of things. Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking. Don't waste good drugs on killing yourself. Share them with friends and have a party. Or send them to me.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

"You Ask The Questions," The Independent Review (2004-03-25)

Thinking

“Death was now armed with a new terror.”

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868) English barrister, politician, and Lord Chancellor of Great Britain

Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Brougham delivered a very warm panegyric upon the ex-Chancellor, and expressed a hope that he would make a good end, although to an expiring Chancellor death was now armed with a new terror. Thomas Campbell, Lives of the Chancellors, vol. vii. p. 163. Lord St. Leonards attributes this phrase to Sir Charles Wetherell, who used it on the occasion referred to by Lord Campbell. It likely originates with the practice of Edmund Curll, who issued miserable catch-penny lives of every eminent person immediately after that person's decease. John Arbuthnot wittily styled him "one of the new terrors of death", Carruthers, Life of Pope (second edition), p. 149.

“The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Two, Ch. 4
On the Road (1957)

Hate

“It is only when death releases the true poet from the embarrassing condition of being at once immortal and alive in the flesh that the people are prepared to honour him; and his spirit as it passes is saluted by a spontaneous display of public emotion. This explains the heavy black headlines in the Press of March 1944: ALUN LEWIS THE POET IS DEAD. Search the back-files and you will find no preparatory announcement: ALUN LEWIS WRITES GREAT POETRY.”

Alun Lewis (1915–1944) Welsh poet

Robert Graves, Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945) p. 7.
Criticism

People, Search, Dead

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance.... That pure chance could be so generous and so kind.... That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time.... That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful.... The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Ann Druyan interviewed by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. — "Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe … and Carl Sagan" http://www.csicop.org/si/show/ann_druyan_talks_about_science_religion/. Skeptical Inquirer 27 (6). November–December 2003.

Life, People, Family, Way

“Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?”

Anna Comnena book Alexiad

The Alexiad, Preface

Dreams, Madness, Dead

“Christianity is a death cult gone horribly wrong.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

from documentary Traceroute

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

"No Worst, There Is None", lines 9 -15
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Life, Mountain, Sleep

“If you are anxious about death, then you don't have a sense of the oneness of things—you feel that after death, you will be no more.”

Sidney Poitier (1927) American-born Bahamian actor, film director, author, and diplomat

"Oprah Talks to Sidney Poitier", http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Oprah-Interviews-Sidney-Poitier/1 O Magazine, October 2000

Feeling, Sense

“No one underestimated Jap: he might be a subhuman creature who tortured and starved prisoners of war to death, raped women captives, and used civilians for bayonet practice, but there was no braver soldier in the whole history of war, and if he fought to a finish…”

George MacDonald Fraser book Quartered Safe Out Here

Source: Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), p. 141.

Women, War, History

“The White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and felt. The White man brought death and emptiness to this place. The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man’s way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn’t need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 2.

Life, Way, Revenge, Tree

“In many ways I still resent the wretched yellow journalism that was clearly evident in (the media's) treatment of the game — 60 Minutes in particular. I've never watched that show after Ed Bradley's interview with me because they rearranged my answers. When I sent some copies of letters from mothers of those two children who had committed suicide who said the game had nothing to do with it, they refused to do a retraction or even mention it on air. What bothered me is that I was getting death threats, telephone calls, and letters. I was a little nervous. I had a bodyguard for a while.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

GameSpy interview, Pt. I (15 August 2004)

Children, Way, Game, Suicide

“Blaine remembered how strange, dark, atavistic and noble Hull’s lordly selection of death has seemed. Pretentious, of course; but then, life itself was a pretension in the vast universe of unliving matter.”

Robert Sheckley book Immortality, Inc.

Source: Immortality, Inc. (1959), Chapter 35 (p. 148)

Life, Universe

“Aniela knows perfectly that I live for her only, exist through her; that all my thoughts belong to her, my actions have only her in view; that she is to me an issue of life and death; and in spite of all that she calmly decides to go away. Whether I should perish or beat my head against the wall, she never so much as considered. She will be more at ease when she ceases to see me writhing like a beetle stuck on a pin; she will be no longer afraid of my kissing her feet furtively, or startling that virtuous conscience. How can she hesitate when such excellent peace can be got, at so small a price as cutting somebody's throat! Thoughts like these spun across my brain by thousands.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Without Dogma

11 July
Without Dogma (1891)

Life, Peace, Kiss

“She throws a kiss, and bids me run
In whispers sweet as roses’ breath;
I know I can not win the race,
And at the end, I know, is death.”

Maurice Thompson (1844–1901) American novelist

Atalanta’s Race.

Kiss

“Had Abraham Lincoln died from any of the numerous ills to which flesh is heir; had he reached that good old age of which his vigorous constitution and his temperate habits gave promise; had he been permitted to see the end of his great work; had the solemn curtain of death come down but gradually, we should still have been smitten with a heavy grief, and treasured his name lovingly. But dying as he did die, by the red hand of violence, killed, assassinated, taken off without warning, not because of personal hate, for no man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him, but because of his fidelity to union and liberty, he is doubly dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever. Fellow citizens, I end, as I began, with congratulations. We have done a good work for our race today. In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator, we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us. We have been fastening ourselves to a name and fame imperishable and immortal; we have also been defending ourselves from a blighting scandal. When now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors; when the foul reproach of ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Hate, Age, Color, Memory

“Everybody is born as a mother’s child. When a person does not respect life, but only uses death tolls (number of 228 massacre 20,000 victims) to measure how big a historical tragedy was, how then are we to conduct a dialogue with a person like this?”

Su Tseng-chang (1947) Taiwanese politician

Su Tseng-chang (2014) cited in " DPP’s Su condemns 228 Massacre remarks http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2014/03/02/2003584669" on Taipei Times, 2 March 2014.

Life, Personality

“He that always waits upon God is ready whenever He calls. Neglect not to set your accounts even; he is a happy man who to lives as that death at all times may find him at leisure to die.”

Owen Feltham (1602–1668) English writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 180.

God, Happiness, Time, Waiting

“I would say that, whenever religion has rule over law, that madness will reign, with automatic violations of human rights, but maybe I'm being alarmist. What do they say? How can we know what sort of society they envision?.. We know that they are nearly all republicans, and that that party has been virtually assimilated by them, and we know they will speak more freely when they feel the safety of numbers. So let's look at the Republican Party platform of one of the red states, a very red state… Of course, they want to make pornography illegal (no surprises there), they also want to be able to filibuster the US senate again… Regarding the environment, they strongly support the immediate repeal and abolishment of the Endangered Species Act. Remember that these people don't believe in evolution, so they don't understand the importance of biodiversity and they don't care about the rights of animals either. They want to dominate and subdue the earth, just like their abominable doctrine demands, so they strongly oppose all efforts of environmental groups that stymie business interests, especially those of the oil and gas industry… Texas republicans not only want marriage to be restricted to one man and one woman (despite what the Bible says), but they insist it must be a natural man and a natural woman… So transgender people would be completely ostracized under the law should they get their way. There's no civil union options for gay couples either, because the platform also opposes the creation, recognition or benefits of partnerships outside marriage that are provided by some political subdivisions. As if that weren't enough, they also want to define the word "family" such that it excludes homosexual couples. They say they deplore sensitivity training (think about that for a moment), and they state very clearly that they want homosexuality condemned as unacceptable. They mean that very strongly too, so strongly in fact that they oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality as a reaction of religious faith. In fact, they go so far as to urge the immediate repeal of the hate crimes law specifically where that relates to sexual orientation… If you're uncertain whether that includes acts of violence, there at least two members of the current State Board of Education who implied that it should, and we know of a few Tea Partiers who insist that homosexuals should be executed, murdered by the state. I am alarmed at how popular this abominable sentiment is… Under the heading "supporting motherhood", they strongly support women who "choose" to devote their lives to their families and raising their children, but they implicitly object to women choosing other options such as college, careers, or not having children at all. A woman's ambition beyond the confines of the kitchen and obeisance to her husband is decried by conservatives as a deplorable assault on the family which, of course, they blame on liberals. Regarding the right to life, they say that all innocent human life must be respected and safeguarded from fertilization to natural death. Notice a few subtle caveats here: the qualifier of protecting only innocent life is how Texas republicans justify having executed more prisoners than any other state in the union, nearly five times as many as the next deadliest state in fact. Says something about Christian forgiveness, doesn't it!”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Republican Theocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSjNg7nQvB0 (November 4, 2012)

Life, Women, Hate, Marriage

“Immediately after the war, when events and memories were fresh, Armenians had no incentive to concoct high casualty figures or genocidal motivations for their deaths. Their objective was statehood.”

Bruce Fein (1947) American lawyer

Lies, Damn Lies, and Armenian Deaths (2009)

War, Motivation, Memory

“The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,
no variety of death,
is silent with the silence of a single note.”

Basil Bunting (1900–1985) Poet

from "Villon" (1930)

Silence, Sea, Forgetting

“Even though homosexuality is considered a sin in all the Semitic holy books, it does not require any punishment in this world. It is a sin that will accompany its committee in the life after death.”

Salman al-Ouda (1956) journalist

2016

Life, Books, World

“At eighty, a man has experienced everything: love, and its ending; ambition, and its emptiness; several foolish beliefs, and their rectification. Fear of death is not very great; affections and interest concern people who have died and events of the past. In a cinema theatre when the show is continuous the spectator has the right to retain his seat as long as he wishes to do so, but actually, when the scenes he has already witnessed reappear on the screen, he leaves the theatre. Life is a continuous show. The same events take place every thirty years, and they become boring. One after another the spectators take their departure.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Love, Life, People, Fear

“We might even predict annually how many individuals will stain their hands with the blood of their fellow-men, how many will be forgers, how many will deal in poison, pretty nearly in the same way as we may foretell annual births and deaths.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Introductory
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

Men, Way, Birth

“A friend cannot be considered a friend unless he is tested on three occasions: in time of need, behind your back and after your death.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Time

“Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.”

Eliza Calvert Hall (1856–1935) American author, women's rights advocate and suffragist

Hall, Eliza Calvert. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1907. Aunt Jane's Album p. 82.
Hall, Eliza Calvert, and Melody Graulich. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Masterworks of literature series. Albany, NY: NCUP, 1992. In the reprinted edition, Graulich discusses the quote on page xxiv.
Aunt Jane of Kentucky (1907)

Love, Life, Religion, Soul

“His chapters inspire me with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself. And the noble canon, with what true chivalrous feeling he confines his beautiful expressions of sorrow to the death of the gallant and high-bred knight, of whom it was a pity to see the fall, such was his loyalty to his king, pure faith to his religion, hardihood towards his enemy, and fidelity to his lady-love! – Ah, benedicite! how he will mourn over the fall of such a pearl of knighthood, be it on the side he happens to favour, or on the other. But, truly, for sweeping from the face of the earth some few hundreds of villain churls, who are born but to plough it, the high-born and inquisitive historian has marvellous little sympathy.”

Jean Froissart (1337–1405) French writer

Claverhouse, in Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816), ch. 35.
Criticism

Love, Faith, Religion, Beauty

“They are both spectacular, life and death.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

"Hush," p. 61
The Shape (2000), Sequence: “Big Chamber”

Life

“It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Variant translation: It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths

“This is a dark painting with a bit of violence because I was very affected by Diana's death. I cried all day because I liked her, warts and all. Most of all I liked the way that she wanted to be loved and didn't mind admitting it.”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Richard Alleyen, "First blood to Saatchi as a star is born", http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/24/nsaat24.xml The Daily Telegraph, (2004-02-24) <br class="br">On Hi Paul Can You Come Over, her painting of Princess Diana.

Love, Way, Painting

“In an age of democracy and of peaceful or warlike communion among all parts of humanity, philosophy, like poetry and politics, must be prophetic. The content of its prophecy is a vision of how it is that we may respond, right now and with the instruments at hand, to the experience of being lost in a void that is made up of time, into the beginning and end of which we cannot see, and that is indifferent to our concerns. It is a prophecy of the path of our unchaining and of our ascent in a world of time, in which we remain always bound to death and forever denied insight into the ultimate nature of reality…. No philosopher or philosophical tradition in the last two centuries has had a monopoly on this prophecy. It is everywhere.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 27

Age, World, Peace, Democracy

“Death: frightening and inevitable./ It is necessary to give rise to better offspring./ It is necessary to give way to a better life-style/ It is necessary due to the law of nature.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Death: Live It! p. 20.
Death: Live It! (2005)

Life, Law, Way, Nature

“Recently I have gone back to church regularly with a new focus to understand as best I can what it is that makes Christianity so vital and powerful in the lives of billions of people today, even though almost 2000 years have passed since the death and resurrection of Christ. Although I suspect I will never fully understand, I now think the answer is very simple: it's true. God did create the universe about 13.7 billion years ago, and of necessity has involved Himself with His creation ever since. The purpose of this universe is something that only God knows for sure, but it is increasingly clear to modern science that the universe was exquisitely fine-tuned to enable human life. We are somehow critically involved in His purpose. Our job is to sense that purpose as best we can, love one another, and help Him get that job done.”

Richard Smalley (1943–2005) American chemist

May 2005, letter sent to the Hope College 2005 Alumni Banquet where he was awarded a distinguished alumni award; his illness prevented him from attending in person

Love, Life, God, People

“Yonder in the unknown vastness"—his long finger stabbed at the black silent jungle which brooded beyond the firelight—"yonder lies mystery and adventure and nameless terror. Once I dared the jungle—once she nearly claimed my bones. Something entered into my blood, something stole into my soul like a whisper of unnamed sin. The jungle! Dark and brooding—over leagues of the blue salt sea she has drawn me and with the dawn I go to seek the heart of her. Mayhap I shall find curious adventure—mayhap my doom awaits me. But better death than the ceaseless and everlasting urge, the fire that has burned my veins with bitter longing.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Hills of the Dead" (1930)

Soul, Heart, Sea

“I think right now is the moment. This is the beginning. We don’t know what is it the moment of, and maybe something much crazier will happen. But really, we see the sunshine coming in. It was clouded for maybe a hundred years. Our whole condition was very sad, but we still feel warmth, and the life in our bodies can still tell that there is excitement in there, even though death is waiting. We had better not enjoy the moment, but create the moment.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Tinari, Philip, and Angie Baecker, eds. Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews. Beijing: Office for Discourse Engineering, 2009.
2000-09, 2009

Life, Sadness, Feeling, Thinking

“Beginning with the first Arab expedition against Thana near Bombay in A. D. 636 the Muslims only succeeded in establishing the Delhi Sultanate in AD 1206, that is, after prolonged and relentless efforts lasting as many as 570 years. The magnitude of the resistance offered by Indians can be easily comprehended if we remember that the duration of the effective Muslim rule over northern India, not to speak of the whole of India which was much less, if ever, lasted only 500 years”

Ram Gopal (1925) Indian author and historian

upto the death of Aurangzeb in AD 1707
Ram Gopal, Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D., 1983, p.101.
Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D.

Effort