Quotes about death (5968 quotes, page 56)

“Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.)”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.

God , People , Waiting

“To be a Satanist is not to be liberated. It is to be bonded to death.”

Sean Sellers (1969–1999) American murderer

Open Letter To Satanists
Context: To be a Satanist is not to be liberated. It is to be bonded to death. The freedom it offers is an illusion. And this is something I know every Satanist knows, because I was there. In the dark and quiet, all alone, without the buzz of alcohol or drugs, or the rhythm of music to drown out the sounds, there is an empty echo inside us. A vacancy. A feeling of loss and cold and turmoil and hunger. That emptiness gnaws and hurts worse than anything else in life; we take up knives to carve our skin just to escape it, or run into the arms of a lover to smother it, but it doesn't go away. It grows. It is death at work, emptiness causing decay. No matter how much we feed it SIN, it will never fill up.

“And what is death? an end to trouble. An end to strife and fear.”

David Gemmell book Legend

Source: Drenai series, Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde, Ch. 7
Context: [A]ll men die.... A man needs many things in his life to make it bearable. A good woman. Sons and daughters. Comradeship. Warmth. Food and shelter. but above all these things, he needs to be able to know that he is a man. And what is a man? He is someone who rises when life has knocked him down. Someone who raises his fist to heaven when a storm has ruined his crop — and then plants again. And again. A man remains unbroken by the savage twists of fate. That man may never win. But when he sees himself reflected, he can be proud of what he sees. For low he may be in the scheme of things: peasant, serf, or dispossessed. But he is unconquerable. And what is death? an end to trouble. An end to strife and fear.... Bear this in mind when you decide your future.

Fear

“To overcome the fear of death it is necessary to accept that we all have to die”

Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018) master yogi, author, builder, commentator of Indian spiritual tradition

Silence Speaks, from the chalkboard of Baba Hari Dass, 1977
Context: Q: What can I do to overcome my fear of death? A: Attachment to the body causes fear of death. It is the strongest attachment. Even a newborn infant has this attachment. To overcome the fear of death it is necessary to accept that we all have to die. (p.39)

Fear

“Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity. The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 60

Tree , Universe

“There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Reaper and the Flowers

The Reaper and the Flowers, st. 1 (1839).

“Yet yield not to despair! be born again,
And thou shalt live a life of joy and peace,
Shall die a death of triumph, and thy strain
Be changed to notes of rapture ne'er to cease.”

Francis Scott Key (1779–1843) American lawyer and poet

"On Reading Fawcett's Lines On Revisiting Scenes Of Early Life" in Poems of the Late Francis Scott Key, Esq. (1857), p. 87.
Context: p>So sings the world's fond slave! so flies the dream
Of life's gay morn; so sinks the meteor ray
Of fancy into darkness; and no beam
Of purer light shines on the wanderer's way.So sings not he who soars on other wings
Than fancy lends him; whom a cheering faith
Warms and sustains, and whose freed spirit springs
To joys that bloom beyond the reach of death.And thou would'st live again! again dream o'er
The wild and feverish visions of thy youth
Again to wake in sorrow, and deplore
Thy wanderings from the peaceful paths of truth! Yet yield not to despair! be born again,
And thou shalt live a life of joy and peace,
Shall die a death of triumph, and thy strain
Be changed to notes of rapture ne'er to cease.</p

Life , Peace , Change , Joy

“Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"Ultima Ratio Regum"
The Still Centre (1939)
Context: Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?

World , Lying , Tree

“Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union, save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God. The fact has been rammed home by a constitutional amendment: every office-holder, when he takes oath to support the Constitution, must swear on his honour that, summoned to the death-bed of his grandmother, he will not take the old lady a bottle of wine.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)
Context: Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union, save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God. The fact has been rammed home by a constitutional amendment: every office-holder, when he takes oath to support the Constitution, must swear on his honour that, summoned to the death-bed of his grandmother, he will not take the old lady a bottle of wine. He may say so and do it, which makes him a liar, or he may say so and not do it, which makes him a pig. But despite that grim dilemma there are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way out of the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdyhouses with virgins. My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease to be virgins.

God , Democracy , Home , Support

“Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Thank Goodness! (2006)
Context: Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany? Was I going to follow in the footsteps of Ayer (who recovered his aplomb and insisted a few days later "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief"), or was my atheism still intact and unchanged?
Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.

Learning

“For whoso lives, as I, in many woes,
How can it be but death shall bring him gain?”

Sophocles (-496–-406 BC) ancient Greek tragedian

ὅστις γὰρ ἐν πολλοῖσιν ὡς ἐγὼ κακοῖς
ζῇ, πῶς ὅδ᾽ οὐχὶ κατθανὼν κέρδος φέρει
Source: Antigone, Line 463-464; Plumptre translation https://archive.org/stream/b24865898#page/444/mode/2up

“Gods reappear in unlimited numbers in the guise of the simulators who have the power of life and death over the simulated realities that they bring into being. The simulators determine the laws, and can change the laws, that govern their worlds. They can engineer anthropic fine-tunings. They can pull the plug on the simulation at any moment, intervene or distance themselves from their simulation; watch as the simulated creatures argue about whether there is a god who controls or intervenes, work miracles or impose their ethical principles upon the simulated reality.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

"Glitch," New Scientist (June 7, 2003)

Life , God , World , Law

“Western classical music, to be sure, is not part of traditional Iranian culture, and yes it’s elitist. But the fact that the Tehran symphony Orchestra and the Roudaki Hall have survived the vagaries of these past three decades is yet another evidence that the forces of darkness, the cult of death, martyrdom and superstition has not conquered the spirit of our nation.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

"Peace and Stability in the Middle East and Beyond: A Hostage to Iranian Intransigence and Adventurism." http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=142&page=4, Oct. 24, 2007.
Speeches, 2007

Music , Past , Parting

“Contrast the world’s thirty-years of silence on the tyranny of this regime to the extremely loud and well-organized protests frequently directed at my father’s government in the 1970s. The difference could not be more distinct or disturbing. Then, the world seemed quite attuned to and concerned with the issue of human rights in my country. Today, with thirty-years worth of full graveyards and more on death row than ever before in Iran, the global silence on the stunning human rights atrocities committed by this supposedly religious regime has been astonishing and disappointing. It is quite frustrating for me and for many of my compatriots to conclude that the global standard on human rights seems to be capriciously administered and certainly has been discounted for Iranians since the establishment of the world’s only modern day theocracy.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

Iran: Unleashing Her Potential Through Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=465&page=1, Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium, Johns Hopkins University, Oct. 12, 2010.
Speeches, 2010

World , Disappointment , Silence , Country

“Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not affraid of dying and going to hell or (what would be considered worse) going to a popularized version of heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Fear , Hell , Time

“When presenting only love, life and death could be more important.”

Unknown author

Love , Life

“Death is more universal than life. Everyone dies but not everyone lives.”

Андреас Адамович Закс (1903–1983)

Life , Universe

“But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. ”

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

World

“Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Learning

“People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. ”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

Hurtful , Life , Pain , People

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Love , Art , Feeling , Mountain

“I had felt with the might of my fast circulating blood that my death would not rob this tree of its irradiant beauty, it would only rob the world of my gaze.”

Jorge Semprún (1923–2011) Spanish writer

World , Beauty , Tree

“Death to normalcy.”

Misha Collins (1974) American actor

“So much is death obligatory that it is almost a formality.”

Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) novelist, playwright and filmmaker from France

“You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power.”

Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) American author and screenwriter

Reality , Imagination

“What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

Fear , Books , History

“Death is the only fantasy that becomes real for all humans.”

Zaman Ali (1993) Pakistani philosopher

"Humanity", Ch.II "Ideologies: A way to live", Part V

“In sociology, just as in biology, uniformity and immobility are death.”

Alfredo Rocco (1875–1935) Italian politician and jurist

“L'ora del nazionalismo” (“Nationalism's hour”), 1919 essay in Alfredo Rocco’s Scritti e discorsi politici, Milan: Giuffrè. Vol. 2, (1938) p. 510

“As giant third world hordes just pour in, raping everyone just reaghhhhhh, reaghhhh! Just sexualizing our children, ruling everything, debasing the currency, drugging the food and water giving everyone cancer and just dancing to their god of death, selling body parts, chopping up babies that battle the scalpel. I mean it's just… it's just on Hell on Earth, the gates are opening. And out will flood the armies…”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

Alex Jones Describes the Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvftj4CVmNo, The Alex Jones Show, February 8, 2017.
2017

Baby , God , Hell , Food

“It's the same story, over and over again! The same dependency, the same slugism, that we see mirrored all around us. Hated by the people, we build! Hated by the people we empower! Hated by the people we've given life to! How do you think God feels!?…they they think they're all in competition with me and all this crap. I'm not in competition with any of you people! I'm in competition with the Devil! I'm in a death battle! And now you see the enemy say they'rein a death battle, they know they're in a death battle, only the spirit, of knowing you're in a death battle will have you win! I don't know how all this is gonna end, but like I've told 'em a thousand times, you wanna fight, better believe you got one. You want to enslave my spirit, no! And I'll call on God to protect me, and use me however God sees fit. And if I'm destroyed my whole family with it, I don't blame God. I blame the stinkin' trash. Who will pay. Now. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever. Tormented by their own spirit.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Alex Jones is in a Death Battle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5lGpU-OnAs, The Alex Jones Show, January 29, 2017.
2017

Family , God , Time , Hate

“Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had?”

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

“And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful.” Peaceful?
"Why Women Aren’t Funny" https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/, Vanity Fair, (January 1, 2007).
2000s, 2007

Birthday , Religion , Making love , Personality

“In the sanguinary struggle with capitalism, the working class cannot refrain from inflicting the last extremity of punishment upon its declared enemies. While the civil war continues, the abolition of the death penalty is impossible.”

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) Soviet politician

74
ABC's of Communism

Penalty , War

“It is only when we move to modem times that we find the first traces of sarva-dharma-samabhâva surfacing in India in the form of the Brahmo Samaj.... Even Keshub Chunder Sen cannot be called a votary of sarva-dharma-samabhâva, strictly speaking. The man fancied himself as the prophet of a New Dispensation (Nababidhâna) which had not only equated all religions but also gone beyond them. He ended by becoming a bag of nauseating nonsense... The trail blazed by Keshub Chander Sen, however, did not go in vain. It was followed by the first disciples of Sri Ramakrishna who took over the Mission after the death of its founder, Swami Vivekananda...”

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) Indian academic

S.R.Goel, Preface, in Goel, Sita Ram (ed.) (1998). Freedom of expression: Secular theocracy versus liberal democracy.

Religion , Time

“After the reduction of Gualiar, the King marched his army towards Malwa, reduced the fort of Bhilsa, and took the city of Oojein, where he destroyed a magnificent temple dedicated to Mahakaly, formed upon the same plan with that of Somnat. This temple is said to have occupied three hundred years in building, and was surrounded by a wall one hundred cubits in height. The image of Vikramaditya, who had been formerly prince of this country, and so renowned, that the Hindoos have taken an era from his death, as also the image of Mahakaly, both of stone, with many other figures of brass, were found in the temple. These images the King caused to be conveyed to Dehly, and broken at the door of the great mosque.”

Iltutmish (1210–1236) Sultan of Mamluk Sultanate

Tãrîkh-i-Firishta by Firishta. Sultãn Shamsu’d-Dîn Iltutmish (AD 1210-1236) Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh)

Country

“But officially Mantell had chased the planet Venus, metamorphosed later into a Skyhook balloon, and thus, alas, met his death. ...This Venus idea makes it very hard to understand a sighting at White Sands Rocket Testing Ground, New Mexico, where a flying saucer was tracked by radar, and found to be cantering along at a mere 18,000 m.p.h.”

George Adamski (1891–1965) American ufologist

Flying Saucers Have Landed

Understanding , Flying , Idea , Making love

“The various writings—narrative, epistolary, and apocalyptic—which make up the New Testament had no common origin, but were composed at different times by at least a score of writers in places which, in view of the difficulties presented to travel by the ancient world, may be said to have been widely remote from each other. With the exception of the Epistles of Paul, none of them, or next to none, were composed until about fifty years after the death of Jesus; and another hundred years elapsed before they were assembled in one collection and began to take their place alongside the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible as authoritative scriptures.”

Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare (1856–1924) British orientalist

p. 1 https://archive.org/details/cu31924029302191/page/n13
History of New Testament Criticism (1910)

Time , Making love , World , Travel

“The topics of The Rambler are many, but the great majority of them are drawn from the graver aspects of life, and it is when he treats of fundamental duties and inevitable sorrows, bereavement, and disease, and death, that Johnson rises to his full stature.”

Walter Raleigh (professor) (1861–1922) British academic

p. 15 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b325850;view=1up;seq=21
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)

Life , Disease

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

Last paragraph of the first edition (1859). Only use of the term "evolve" or "evolution" in the first edition.
In the second http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=508&itemID=F376&viewtype=image (1860) through sixth (1872) editions, Darwin added the phrase "by the Creator" to read:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter XIV: "Recapitulation and Conclusion", page 489-90 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=508&itemID=F373&viewtype=image

Singing , Clothes , Dependency , Law

“In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our phlegm and carelessness. While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone; and death, though perhaps they receive him differently, yet treats alike the fool and the philosopher.”

David Hume book Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

Part I, Essay 18: The Sceptic
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)

Indifference , Game , Fools , Pleasure

“The old Dances of Death supplied what fails so much in our modern life—an artistic representation appealing to all classes of at least one experience common to the whole of humanity.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

Life , Dance

“The shadow of death, more strongly even than blood or nation, maketh mankind akin; it arouses sympathy and understanding, which surmount all the barriers of caste and station.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

Understanding

“You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

"Thailand", from After the Quake (1999)

Time , Strong , Beauty , Future

“Death in your eyes, Earthman. Nothing in your mind but murder. Can that brain of yours comprehend nothing but battle? Is there no curiosity there? Have you no wonder of why I brought you here? Death awaits you, yes. But a not unpleasant death, and it awaits all, in one form or another. Listen, let me tell you—I have reason for desiring to break through that animal shell of self-defense that seals in your mind. Let me look deeper—if there are depths. Your death will be—useful, and in a way, pleasant. Otherwise—well, the black beasts hunger. And flesh must feed them, as a sweeter drink feeds me...Listen.”

C. L. Moore (1911–1987) American author

Black Thirst (1934); p. 63
Short fiction, Northwest of Earth (1954)

Hunger , Drink , Animals , Self-confidence

“Women are stripped to the skin in the presence of leering, white-skinned, black-hearted brutes and lashed into insensibility and strangled to death from the limbs of trees. A girl child of fifteen years was lynched recently by these brutal bullies. Where has justice fled? The eloquence of Wendell Phillips is silent now. John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave. But will his spirit lie there moldering, too? Brutes, inhuman monsters—you heartless brutes—you whom nature forms by molding you in it, deceive not yourselves by thinking that another John Brown will not arise.”

Lucy Parsons (1853–1942) American communist anarchist labor organizer

"Southern Lynching" (April 1892)

Tree , Justice , Girl , Heart

“Verily I say unto you, he that heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life.”

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

My friend, that is worth more than all the feeling you can have in a life-time.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 244

Life

“Just thought and thought! Poor artist of the word!High priest of thought! You cannot flee;The word holds all: the world and man,Death, life, and ever-unveiled truth.”

Evgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844) Russian poet

1840
From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Poetry, http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/mdenner/Demo/texts/thoughts_more_thoughts.html Northwestern University (2001)

World , Truth , Life

“Realizing later that it was not by choice that we remained mute but by a conscious effort on the part of those in power, I realized that my art could only be that of protest—a protest against what I felt to be a death sentence.”

Malaquías Montoya (1938) American artist

On how he used artwork as a form of protest (as quoted in “’What better function for art at this time than as a voice for the voiceless’: The Work of Chicano Artist Malaquías Montoya” https://nacla.org/news/2019/02/17/%E2%80%9Cwhat-better-function-art-time-voice-voiceless%E2%80%9D-work-chicano-artist-malaqu%C3%ADas; 2019 Feb 15)

Effort , Parting , Art

“Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that description, my death seems to disappear.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 45

Time , Dead , Reality , Relation ships

“Reincarnation comes under the more general doctrine of reimbodiment. It is the teaching that the human ego returns to earth at some future time after the change men call death... in order that the ego may learn new lessons on earth, in new times, in new environments; taking up again on this earth the old links of sympathy and of friendship, of hatred and dislike, which were apparently ruptured by the hand of death when the ego-soul left our spheres.”

Gottfried de Purucker (1874–1942) Author, Theosophist

Source: The Esoteric Tradition (1935), Chapter 2

Soul , Time , Friendship , Future

“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.”

Peter Matthiessen book The Snow Leopard

"October 5", p. 42
The Snow Leopard (1978)

Money , Life , Nature , Water

“So we’re withdrawing troops from the Middle East. GOOD! What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million? How much have we spent, $5 trillion? Five-and-a-half? For that cost, we’ve destabilized the region to the point of abject chaos, inspired millions of Muslims to hate us, and torn up the Geneva Convention and half the Constitution in pursuit of policies like torture, kidnapping, assassination-by-robot and warrantless detention.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

War , Hate

“World War II, at least in Europe, may have had some moral justification, though there can be some legitimate debate as to whether the US and its freedoms were ever really threatened, and certainly many of the Americans who died in that war saw their struggle as worthy, so that we may at least in good conscience honor their deaths. But Khe Sanh? Mosul? And for god’s sake, Marjah? Let’s get real. Khe Sanh, one of the major battles in the Vietnam War, was just one little piece of a huge malignant disaster in a war that was criminal from its inception, and that had no purpose beyond perpetuating the neocolonialist control by the US of a long-subjugated people who were fighting to be free, just as our own ancestors had done. The over 58,000 Americans who died in that war, who contributed to the killing of over 2 million Vietnamese, many or most of them civilians, may have engaged in personal acts of bravery, but they were not, as a group, heroes. Nor were they over there fighting for American freedom. Some, like Lt. William Calley, who did not die, were no doubt murderers. Most, though, were simply victims–victims of their own government’s years of lying and deceit. If we memorialize them, it should be by vowing never again to allow our government to commit such crimes, and to send Americans to fight and die for such criminal policies. Sadly, we’ve already allowed that to happen, though, over and over again–in the Panama, in Grenada, in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan and perhaps, before long, Iran and/or Pakistan.”

Dave Lindorff (1949) Award winning American journalist

The Glorification of War, 2010

God , Freedom , War , Personality

“And I am even sicker of politicians who wrap themselves in the bloody flag and try to rub off some of the stench of death from the bodies of those who have died, mostly in vain for worthless causes, in hopes that taking on some of the odor will cause them to be perceived as admirable patriots themselves.”

Dave Lindorff (1949) Award winning American journalist

The Glorification of War, 2010

Hope

“If I am assassinated, there is only one person responsible: the president of the United States. If, by the hand of the devil, these perverse plans succeed...forget about Venezuelan oil, Mr Bush. I will not hide, I will walk in the streets with all of you...but I know I am condemned to death.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Source: Hugo Chávez message to George Bush during his television/radio show ¡Aló Presidente! on February 20, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/22/venezuela.julianborger

Forgetting , Personality

“I began to think about its double nature: on the one hand you have an organ in your body and on the other you have a symbol of love. From that time I started to pursue the image of a heart crossing the night from one body to another. It is a simple narrative structure but it’s open to a lot of things. I had the intuition that this book could give form to my intimate experience of death.”

Maylis de Kerangal (1967) French writer

On the heart as the focus for her book Mend the Living in “‘What is a heart? You have an organ in your body and you have a symbol of love’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/28/maylis-de-kerangal-interview-wellcome-prize-writing in The Guardian (2017 Apr 28)

Time , Night , Making love , Heart

“Faith healers have gotten one thing right: the human body can detect and defeat all types of diseases including cancer—the second leading cause of death in America. Our mind and body are closely connected. But faith healers have neglected one important point: the complex human brain—created in the image of God—is meant to invent new technologies including medical treatments for our mind and body.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

God , Faith , Disease

“You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it. I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all the immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

The Judge to Robert G. Ingersoll
"Beyond" (1933)

Love , Making love

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Family , Reality , Suffering

“While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time.”

William Stringfellow (1928–1985) American theologian

Source: An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973), p. 60

Life , Time

“At first the child is amused by his anus and feces, and gaily inserts his finger into the orifice, smelling it, smearing feces on the walls, playing games of touching objects with his anus, and the like. This is a universal form of play that does the serious work of all play: it reflects the discovery and exercise of natural bodily functions; it masters an area of strangeness; it establishes power and control over the deterministic laws of the natural world; and it does all this with symbols and fancy. With anal play the child is already becoming a philosopher of the human condition. But like all philosophers he is still bound by it, and his main task in life becomes the denial of what the anus represents: that in fact, he is nothing but body so far as nature is concerned. Nature’s values are bodily values, human values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it, always brought back to it. As Montaigne put it, on the highest throne in the world man sits on his arse. Usually this epigram makes people laugh because it seems to reclaim the world from artificial pride and snobbery and to bring things back to egalitarian values. But if we push the observation even further and say men sit not only on their arse, but over a warm and fuming pile of their own excrement—the joke is no longer funny. The tragedy of man’s dualism, his ludicrous situation, becomes too real. The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas
The Denial of Death (1973)

Law , Fate , Making love , Game

“Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles—my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

Foreword
The Denial of Death (1973)

Selfishness , God , Nature , Animals

“People aware of their own birth and death in this way are said not to be lacking. Not lacking in what? Not lacking in birth. They’re acquainted with the births they’ve experienced through many lives and states of being in the past—so many that they’re weary of it all, to the point where they don’t want to take birth again. As for people who don’t know, who don’t have this awareness, they feel that they’re lacking. They want to take birth again and so they keep on creating birth over and over again. As for those who do have awareness, they’ve had enough. They’re smart enough. They won’t give rise to any more births or states of being. Whatever is good, they keep within themselves, like putting a ripe mango seed in a showcase to look at, or peeling off its hard outer shell and then putting it in a storeroom. No one will be able to plant it again, and we can take it out for a look whenever we want.”

Ajahn Lee (1907–1961)

Inner Strength (1956), as translated from the Thai by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

Past , People , Way , Birth

“Putin was personally angered by events in Libya and the death of President Mammar Qaddafi at the hands of rebels as Qaddafi tried to flee Tripoli after NATO’s intervention in the civil war there. In Putin’s view (again expressed openly in his public addresses and in interviews), the United States was now responsible for a long sequence of revolutions close to Russia’s borders and in countries with close ties to Moscow.”

Fiona Hill (presidential advisor) (1965) American policy adviser

Understanding and deterring Russia: U.S. policies and strategies, https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/understanding-and-deterring-russia-u-s-policies-and-strategies/ Brookings (10 February 10, 2016)

Anger , Country , War , Personality

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty. The severity of tyrants has barbarity for its principle; that of a republican government is founded on beneficence. Therefore let him beware who should dare to influence the people by that terror which is made only for their enemies! Let him beware, who, regarding the inevitable errors of civism in the same light, with the premeditated crimes of perfidiousness, or the attempts of conspirators, suffers the dangerous intriguer to escape and pursues the peaceable citizen! Death to the villain who dares abuse the sacred name of liberty or the powerful arms intended for her defence, to carry mourning or death to the patriotic heart...”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Principles to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Republic (February 1794)

Forgiveness , Light , Suffering , Heart

“The American mainstream news media have so far steered well clear of the subject because the phenomenon has been enthusiastically embraced by the talk radio fringe, leading to a death spiral of diminishing credibility.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 14, “Infected” (p. 266)

“By facing mortality, it seems to inform how you live. So, the secret is that facing death has a lot to do with living well…”

BJ Miller (1971) palliative caregiver

On providing palliative care in “Brief But Spectacular: BJ Miller—Palliative Care Specialist” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/brief/194874/bj-miller in PBS

Secret

“Myths die hard. We humans define ourselves by the ideological teams we join. We are liberals or conservatives, Christians or atheists, Yankee fans or Red Sox fans. We filter facts to conform to our group’s ideology and then defend that ideology to the death. Only a truly momentous event can make us change teams…”

Carlos Lacámara (1958) American actor

On people choosing sides and scapegoating others (as quoted in the book Nuestras Voces: Latino Plays, Volume One https://books.google.com/books?id=FLj1AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA258&lpg=PA258&dq)

Making love , Change

“It is vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, peace! But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

Disputed, Give me liberty, or give me death! (1775)

Peace , God , War , Cry

“Evidently some people will come to the conclusion that several of the political movements or parties are performing an indirect magical action with the gesture of salute, and in this manner supply the general reservoir with more, however small parts of the vital power, by constant repetition. We shall remember the salute of the German Nazis, consisting in a lifting of the hand and certainly representing a certain gesture of power. But if such an increased collective power reservoir is used for greedy and questionable purposes, this mentally strained power is turning against the founders because of its polarity, and decay and destruction will follow, apart from the fact that the curses of the absolutely innocent victims pining in prisons, sentenced to death or sent to hopeless battles in the field, will invisibly produce an opposite polarity that will also contribute to the decomposition of the power reservoir.”

Franz Bardon book Initiation Into Hermetics

Source: Initiation Into Hermetics (1956), p. 65.

People , Parting , Question

“Traveling between the planets had never eliminated murder. So many highly evolved primates in the same box for months on end, a certain death rate had to be expected.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 14 (p. 148)

Travel , Box

“If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 45 (p. 494)

Life

“Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live twelve months. This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five. Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 5, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families."

Family , Chance , Children , Health

“Remember that you are a chosen people! The spirit of the Lord has descended upon me, because I am Emperor of the Germans! I am the instrument of the Most High. I am His sword, His representative. Woe and death to all those who resist my will! Woe and death to those who do not believe in my mission! Woe and death to the cowards! Let them perish,—all the enemies of the German people! God demands their destruction,—God who, through my mouth, commands you to execute His will.”

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

Proclamation to his Eastern Army (1914), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 108
1910s

God , People

“Arise, to arms! All hesitation, all delay is treason to the country. It is a question of the life or death of our Empire, of the life or death of German Might. We shall defend ourselves to the last breath and to the last man. Though a world of enemies come, we shall fight notwithstanding. When Germany has remained united, she has never been vanquished. Forward with God, for God will be with us as He was with our fathers.”

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

Proclamation to his People (7 August 1914), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 7
1910s

God , Country , Question , World

“An angry countenance is much against nature, and it is oftentimes the proper countenance of them that are at the point of death. But were it so, that all anger and passion were so thoroughly quenched in thee, that it were altogether impossible to kindle it any more, yet herein must not thou rest satisfied, but further endeavour by good consequence of true ratiocination, perfectly to conceive and understand, that all anger and passion is against reason.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

VII, 18
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII

Anger , Understanding , Nature , Passion

“There can thus be no manner of doubt that the Muslim Society in India is afflicted by the same social evils as afflict the Hindu Society. Indeed, the Muslims have all the social evils of the Hindus and something more. That something more is the compulsory system of purdah for Muslim women. As a consequence of the purdah system, a segregation of the Muslim women is brought about. The ladies are not expected to visit the outer rooms, verandahs, or gardens; their quarters are in the back-yard. All of them, young and old, are confined in the same room. …She cannot go even to the mosque to pray, and must wear burka (veil) whenever she has to go out. These burka women walking in the streets is one of the most hideous sights one can witness in India. Such seclusion cannot but have its deteriorating effects upon the physical constitution of Muslim women. They are usually victims to anaemia, tuberculosis, and pyorrhoea. Their bodies are deformed, with their backs bent, bones protruded, hands and feet crooked. Ribs, joints and nearly all their bones ache. Heart palpitation is very often present in them. The result of this pelvic deformity is untimely death at the time of delivery. Purdah deprives Muslim women of mental and moral nourishment. Being deprived of healthy social life, the process of moral degeneration must and does set in. Being completely secluded from the outer world, they engage their minds in petty family quarrels, with the result that they become narrow and restricted in their outlook. They lag behind their sisters from other communities, cannot take part in any outdoor activity and are weighed down by a slavish mentality and an inferiority complex. They have no desire for knowledge, because they are taught not to be interested in anything outside the four walls of the house. Purdah women in particular become helpless, timid, and unfit for any fight in life. … Not that purdah and the evils consequent thereon are not to be found among certain sections of the Hindus in certain parts of the country. But the point of distinction is that among the Muslims, purdah has a religious sanctity which it has not with the Hindus. Purdah has deeper roots among the Muslims than it has among the Hindus, and can only be removed by facing the inevitable conflict between religious injunctions and social needs. The problem of purdah is a real problem with the Muslims—apart from its origin—which it is not with the Hindus. Of any attempt by the Muslims to do away with it, there is no evidence.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Family , Time , Housing , Country

“There were the Chârvâkas, who preached horrible things, the most rank, undisguised materialism, such as in the nineteenth century they dare not openly preach. These Charvakas were allowed to preach from temple to temple, and city to city, that religion was all nonsense, that it was priestcraft, that the Vedas were the words and writings of fools, rogues, and demons, and that there was neither God nor an eternal soul. If there was a soul, why did it not come back after death drawn by the love of wife and child. Their idea was that if there was a soul it must still love after death, and want good things to eat and nice dress. Yet no one hurt these Charvakas.”

Charvaka An unorthodox school of Hindu philosophy

Swami Vivekananda as recorded in the complete works of Swami Vivekananda https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_2/Jnana-Yoga/Maya_and_the_Evolution_of_the_Conception_of_God.

Hurt , God , Soul , Religion

“Last night was a great night for the United States and for the World. A brutal killer, one who has caused so much hardship and death, was violently eliminated – he will never again harm another innocent man, woman or child. He died like a dog. He died like a coward. The world is now a much safer place.”

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

2010s, 2019, October, Statement on the Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

World , Dogs , Night

“The death penalty is being applied in the United States as a fatal lottery.”

Bianca Jagger (1945) Nicaraguan-born social and human rights advocate and a former actress

Penalty

“As these remarks indicate, the Social Security program involves a transfer from the young to the old. To some extent such a transfer has occurred throughout history—the young supporting their parents, or other relatives, in old age. Indeed, in many poor countries with high infant death rates, like India, the desire to assure oneself of progeny who can provide support in old age is a major reason for high birth rates and large families. The difference between Social Security and earlier arrangements is that Social Security is compulsory and impersonal—earlier arrangements were voluntary and personal. Moral responsibility is an individual matter, not a social matter. Children helped their parents out of love or duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The earlier transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken them.”

Milton Friedman book Free to Choose

Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 4 “Cradle to Grave”, p. 106

Family , History , Country , Making love

“Social conditions that spur large numbers of people into action are ignored in favor of a Hollywood version of history focusing on one conquering hero. Since a movement for social change is embodied in its leader, death of the leader means death of the movement.”

Patricia Hill Collins (1948) African-American scholar

"We don't need another Dr. King" in Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle (2000), p. 908

People , History , Change

“It is helpful to recall that the death of the person is a single event, consisting in the total disintegration of that unitary and integrated whole that is the personal self. The death of the person, understood in this primary sense, is an event which no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Human experience shows that once death occurs certain biological signs inevitably follow, which medicine has learnt to recognize with increasing precision. In this sense, the "criteria" for ascertaining death used by medicine today should not be understood as the technical-scientific determination of the exact moment of a person's death, but as a scientifically secure means of identifying the biological signs that a person has indeed died.
Address to the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society, 29 August 2000

Personality , Help , Self-confidence , Sense

“Jack Chick was a graphic artist who lived his delusional life in lies, prejudice and paranoia, promoting racist, sexist credo-specific bigotry against everyone smarter than him, or who understood things better than he did: which is pretty much everyone since he was really impressively fucking stupid -even compared to other creationists. He was so bad that Chick Publications is recognized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. So now I hear that this creepy old dogmatic fucktard has finally stopped breathing at 92 years old. I’m unapologetically glad about that. His death makes our world a better place. I think that everyone who believes the way that he did should show solidarity by burying their faces in the sand and holding their breath until Jack Chick breathes again. Because our world just doesn’t need anyone like that -making life irritating for everyone capable of rational or compassionate thought.”

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

"Rest in oblivion, Jack Chick" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/10/25/rest-oblivion-jack-chick/, Patheos (October 25, 2016)
Patheos

Hate , Law , Making love , Bad luck

“I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 16, “Eater of Souls” (p. 294)

Lying

“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.”
Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), pp. 396-397

Fashion , Life

“I confess, the Amnewor is new to me. Yes, I’ve heard the name—as a minor fact in some other god’s story. Precisely what it did, though, I can’t remember. That, of course, makes it more intriguing. Death. It was associated with endless, mindless, pointless death. But which of them isn’t?”

Samuel R. Delany book Flight from Nevèrÿon

Section 9.81 (p. 273)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

God , Making love

“The theme of choice and the power of culture pops up in my stories often. Before Binti, the biggest example of this is in Who Fears Death when Onyesonwu must face the decision of whether or not to go through a ceremony that required cutting off her clitoris. To many readers, the fact that she even has to think about whether or not to do this is shocking. It’s not shocking to me at all, coming from the culture that I come from where the individual is often secondary to the community…”

Nnedi Okorafor (1974) Nigerian-American writer of fantasy and science fiction

On choice being reconciled with culture in her works in “Interview: A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor” http://weirdfictionreview.com/2017/02/interview-conversation-nnedi-okorafor/ in Weird Fiction Review (2017 Feb 20)
Personal life

Communication , Thinking , Decision , Fear

“These deaths are what a broken immigration system is all about. Instead of demonizing immigrants, Trump should be meeting with Central American leaders to find ways to end the horrific violence and poverty that are forcing people to flee their homelands.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Twitter Post https://twitter.com/SenSanders, (26 June 2019)
2010s, 2019, June 2019

Way , People

“In the ideal universe the life and happiness of no being are contingent on the suffering and death of any other, and the fact that in this world of ours life and happiness have been and are to-day so commonly maintained by the infliction of misery and death by some beings on others is the most painful fact that ever entered an enlightened mind.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), The Survival of the Strenuous, p. 167

Pain , Suffering , Universe , World

“I have seen a mother mouse in a moment of peril flee from her home among the falling pieces of a cord-wood pile, and disappear under the roots of a neighbouring oak. I have seen her a little later, recovered from her initial dismay, making her way back again, clambering along among the tangled timbers, stopping now and then to look and listen, her eyes wild and anxious, and her whole little body quaking with excitement. I have seen her go among the ruins of her dwelling, take a poor little squeaking young one in her mouth, and hurry away with it to the gloomy refuge in the roots of the oak. I have watched her return again and again, each time taking in her careful teeth the tiny body of a babe, until five mouthfuls of precious pink were safely lodged within the fortress of the oak. And I could as soon believe that woman, when she saves her children from some fearful harm, is a soulless machine as think that that brave little woodmother, out there alone under the trees, snatching her darlings from the jaws of death, was a heroine without sense or feeling.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Common-Sense View", pp. 184–185
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Psychical Kinship

Home , Tree , Time , Making love

“The dread of death, an instinct so unfailing in all animals, exists, not because existence is intrinsically so sweet, nor because annihilation is so distressing, but because this bugaboo has been an indispensable safeguard against the suicide of the life process. The expectation of post-mortem consciousness, so prevalent and so insistent among human beings, is a hope arising from the concussion of a desire and a fancy—the desire to persist just referred to, and the fancy or hallucination of a double which originated among savages from shadows, images, dreams, and the like.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Derivation of the Nature of Living Beings, pp. 176–177

Suicide , Dreams , Hope , Animals

“Oh, universe! Pitiful spectacle! Aggregation of tragedy, somnambulism, inhumanity, terrorism, and death! It makes one long to seal up his sensibilities and leap out into the gulfs and be swallowed up. The handiwork of an all-wise biophilist? Rhapsody of an idiot! Gods? No! The monstrous kindergarten of an idle-pated knave! A Satanic prank! The surreptitious handiwork of an ass! A universe is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious and so ethically embryonic that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, pp. 131–132

God , Making love , Universe , Life

“Disease is contagious, and death an unavoidable necessity. Pleasure is often exhausting, and life is everywhere interpolated with pain. Droughts, darknesses, floods, pestilences, storms, and scourges harrow the earth from one pole of it to the other. The earth is, and always has been, peopled by deformities—creatures so defective in their natures that they visit upon each other without hesitancy crimes and barbarities of the most horrible hue. These wretches are compelled to pass their lives in the midst of a universe so mysterious and mighty that the most arrogant of us are helpless in the crash and melee of its tendencies. Yet human contemplators look out over this dark and contentious chaos and declare it to be without spot or blemish.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 87–88

Pain , People , Nature , Pleasure

“I became a vegetarian by my own reflection. I did not know at the time of the vegetarian movement, and hence, supposed myself among republics of carnivora. It did not seem to me graceful or ideal that I, an ethical being should maintain my existence at the incessant expense of misery and death to others.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895), pp. 11—12

Time

“This is a gray world. There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other—the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Quoted by Henry S. Salt in Seventy Years Among Savages (1921), p. 244

Forgiveness , Making love , Help , World

“This is a gray world. There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other—the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving. We preach the Golden Rule with an enthusiasm that is well-nigh vehement, and then freckle the globe with huge murder-houses for the expeditious destruction of those who have as good a right to live as we have.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

" The Unconscious Holocaust https://archive.org/details/theunconsciousholocaust-jhowardmoore", Good Health: A Journal of Hygiene, Vol 32, Iss. 2, 1 Feb. 1897, p. 75

Forgiveness , Housing , Making love , Help

“The police department and the armed forces are the two arms of the power structure, the muscles of control and enforcement. They have deadly weapons with which to inflict pain on the human body. They know how to bring about hirrble deaths. They have clubs with which to beat the body and the head. They have bullets and guns with which to tear holes in the flesh, to smash bones, to disable and kill. They use force, to make you do what the deciders have decided you must do.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

"Domestic Law and International Order"
1960s, Soul on Ice (1968)

Pain , Tear , Making love

“Many people are familiar with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fact, it has already been abolished in ost countries. Even the staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter One

Imagination , Country , Penalty , People

“A pure Democracy, by which I mean a Society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of Government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of Government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
Federalist No. 10
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Democracy , Personality , Communication , Passion

Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana

United States of Banana (2011)

Law , Communication

Quotes about death
page 56

Related topics

Quotes about death page 56

Related topics

Quotes about death
page 56