A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Context: As no national interest would justify inflicting genocide on the victim and suicide on the aggressor, a prevalent misconception is that nuclear war will never be fought. But the realities of our age compel an opposite assessment. In no previous epoch were adversaries so continuously and totally mobilized for instant war. It is a statistical certainly that hair-trigger readiness cannot endure as a permanent condition. Furthermore, the unrelenting growth in nuclear arsenals, the increasing accuracy of missiles, and the continuing computerization of response systems all promote instabilities which court nuclear war by technical malfunction; by miscalculation, human aberration or criminal act.
Quotes about suicide
page 6
“There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.”
Steppenwolf (1927)
Context: He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to which this thought imparts a common strength.
Source: Andre Cornelis (1886), Ch. 14
Context: I had to take the necessary steps to prevent this alleged suicide from getting known, to see the commissary of police and the "doctor of the dead." I had to preside at the funeral ceremonies, to receive the guests and act as chief mourner. And always, always, he was present to me, with the dagger in his breast, writing the lines that had saved me, and looking at me, while his lips moved.
Ah, begone, begone, abhorred phantom! Yes! I have done it; yes! I have killed you; yes! it was just. You know well that it was just. Why are you still here now? Ah! I will live; I will forget. If I could only cease to think of you for one day, only one day, just to breathe, and walk, and see the sky, without your image returning to haunt my poor head which is racked by this hallucination, and troubled? My God! have pity on me. I did not ask for this dreadful fate; it is Thou that hast sent it to me. Why dost Thou punish me? Oh, my God, have pity on me!
Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)
Context: I have an essay with the title "Eyes in their Last Extremity".
The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued:
"I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity."
Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five.
In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.
Address at the National Archives dedicating a shrine for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (15 December 1952) https://trumanlibrary.org/calendar/viewpapers.php?pid=2102
Context: Of course, there are dangers in religious freedom and freedom of opinion. But to deny these rights is worse than dangerous, it is absolutely fatal to liberty. The external threat to liberty should not drive us into suppressing liberty at home. Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.
All freedom-loving nations, not the United States alone, are facing a stern challenge from the Communist tyranny. In the circumstances, alarm is justified. The man who isn't alarmed simply doesn't understand the situation — or he is crazy. But alarm is one thing, and hysteria is another. Hysteria impels people to destroy the very thing they are struggling to preserve.
Invasion and conquest by Communist armies would be a horror beyond our capacity to imagine. But invasion and conquest by Communist ideas of right and wrong would be just as bad.
For us to embrace the methods and morals of communism in order to defeat Communist aggression would be a moral disaster worse than any physical catastrophe. If that should come to pass, then the Constitution and the Declaration would be utterly dead and what we are doing today would be the gloomiest burial in the history of the world.
Source: Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (1997), Chapter 14, "The Common Enemy"
Context: Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.
Between Hell and Reason (1945)
Context: The world is what it is, which is to say, nothing much. This is what everyone learned yesterday, thanks to the formidable concert of opinion coming from radios, newspapers, and information agencies. Indeed we are told, in the midst of hundreds of enthusiastic commentaries, that any average city can be wiped out by a bomb the size of a football. American, English, and French newspapers are filled with eloquent essays on the future, the past, the inventors, the cost, the peaceful incentives, the military advantages, and even the life-of-its-own character of the atom bomb.
We can sum it up in one sentence: Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.
Meanwhile we think there is something indecent in celebrating a discovery whose use has caused the most formidable rage of destruction ever known to man. What will it bring to a world already given over to all the convulsions of violence, incapable of any control, indifferent to justice and the simple happiness of men — a world where science devotes itself to organized murder? No one but the most unrelenting idealists would dare to wonder.
So I started my Love Class. I taught it free of salary and tuition just so students could have a forum to consider the truly essential things. I really didn't "teach" the class. I facilitated it — helping the students to discover their own magic.
A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Derivation of the Nature of Living Beings, pp. 176–177
15 February 2019 https://twitter.com/andrewyangvfa/status/1096442292527874048
Walid Shoebat, What Every American Must Know About Sharia BEFORE They Vote: How Hillary Clinton Duped America By Pushing Khizr Khan, A Sharia Muslim Scholar http://shoebat.com/2016/08/04/what-every-american-must-know-about-sharia-before-they-vote-how-hillary-clinton-duped-america-by-pushing-khizr-khan-a-sharia-muslim-scholar/ (August 4, 2016)
About
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in quotes https://www.irishtimes.com/news/abu-musab-al-zarqawi-in-quotes-1.786124 The Irish Times (18th May 2005)
Source: Suicides and Compassion 1932, The Theosophist https://www.theosophyforward.com/index.php/theosophy/609-suicides-and-compassion.html (2012)
Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 22.
Tumblr postings
In a Graham Greene review of the novel Company K for the newspaper The Spectator.
Keith Kloor, science journalist, as quoted in " The GMO-Suicide Myth http://issues.org/30-2/keith/", Issues in Science and Technology (Winter 2014)
The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine
The Groundbreaking Public Health Study That Should Change U.S. Society—But Won’t https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/19/the-groundbreaking-public-health-study-that-should-change-u-s-society-but-wont/, (19 July 2019)
Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts
2010s, Portrait of the Ally as an Intermediary (March 2018)
“...any Japanese officer wishing to commit suicide would be given every facility.”
Source: Defeat Into Victory (1961), p. 442
Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn: The Greatest Illusion on Earth (2010), Dedication
“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (Sept. 1970)
Embracing Death, pp. 143-144
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)
“Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.”
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
“I admire only two types of people: the potentially mad and the potential suicide.”
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 287
Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 276
Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 276
Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
pp. 73-74
Suicide Watch on Planet Earth, CounterPunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/26/suicide-watch-on-planet-earth/(26 April 2019)
"The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery", part VII, p. 92
Essays and Phantasies (1881)
"The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery", part VII, p. 91
Essays and Phantasies (1881)
Source: Young Nun´s Suicide Shocks The Church In Kerala https://www.ucanews.com/story-archive/?post_name=/2008/08/12/young-nuns-suicide-shocks-the-church-in-kerala&post_id=49014 (12 August 2008)
Source: The Great Delusion https://scheerpost.com/2020/12/21/chris-hedges-the-great-delusion/. Scheerpost, December 21, 2020
2022, June 2022, Remarks on Gun Violence in America