Quotes about the dead (3313 quotes, page 22)

“He didn't want to learn another thing. Motionless, he constantly stared at the same spot, unseeing. He breathed as if the air were loam. …he no longer wanted to be quick. …he wanted to slow down until he died. …Outside the passage of time… until they'd think him dead. …The alterations of day and night would finally become just a flickering… John sucked in the air and held his breath. …everything would be as it had been before his birth. He would have never been.”

Sten Nadolny book The Discovery of Slowness

The Discovery of Slowness (1983, 1987)

Birth , Thinking , Learning , Time

“It’s not right-wing populism that endangers Jewish survival in Europe and Canada; it’s the influx of Muslims. There’s nothing new in the Jewish leadership’s habit of kibitzing about the dangers to Jewish continuity from marauding Mormons (their sin is to convert dead Jews). Or, from Mel Gibson, whose movie “The Passion of the Christ” was supposed to unleash pogroms in Pittsburgh, as they falsely prophesied.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Islam, Not Trump, Is The Elephant In The Room, Threatening Jewish Survival" https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2017/02/23/islam-not-trump-is-the-elephant-in-the-room-threatening-jewish-survival-n2289643 Townhall.com, February 23, 2017
2010s, 2017

Passion , Christ , Falseness

“Poor Pymfyd! Your world is built of fear and dread! As for me, I have no time for such emotions.”
Pymfyd spoke in an even voice. “You are a royal princess and I may not call you a witless little fool, even should the thought cross my mind.”
Madouc turned him a sad blue-eyed glance. “So that, after all, is your concept of me.”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

“I will say only this: persons who fear nothing are soon dead.”
Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), Madouc (1989), Chapter 3, section 3 (p. 722)

World , Sadness , Fear , Fools

“The twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying:
“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,
the One who is and who was,
because you have taken your great power
and have begun to reign.
The nations were angry,
and your wrath has come.
The time has come for judging the dead,
and for rewarding your servants the prophets
and your people who revere your name,
both great and small—
and for destroying those who destroy the earth.””

John of Patmos Christian saint and author of the Book of Revelation

11:16-18 NIV
Apocalypse of John

God , People , Time

“Yet this Charteris speaks from a perished world, he babbles of a civilization as dead as Babylon's… [In 1918, for example, ] Woodrow Wilson was filling, accurately, the former station of William McKinley and of James K. Polk; and in many quarters was being taken quite as seriously as had been his predecessors during their own personally directed wars for moral principles so consistently elevated that they have never yet sunk into human comprehension.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Beyond Life (1919; 1927 edition), Author's Note

War , World , Personality

“Do you believe that a dead woman can conceive from a live man and bring forth a live child? Do you believe it, any of you mothers? Do you believe it, any of you fathers? No, you know better. Well, if a woman will not produce when she is dead, then the earth cannot produce living things if it was dead. Does the earth conceive? It does, and it brings forth. If it did not, why do you go and put your wheat into the ground? Does it not conceive it? But it does not conceive except you put it there. It conceives and brings forth, and you and I live, both for food and for clothing, silks and satins. What! satin grow? Yes. What produces it? The silkworm produces it. Does the silkworm produce except it conceives? No, it eats of the mulberry tree. Where does the mulberry tree come from? It comes from the earth. Where did the earth come from? From its parent earths. Well, some of you may call that foolish philosophy. But if it is, I will throw out foolish things, that you may gather up wise things. The earth is alive. If it was not, it could not produce: If you find a piece of earth that is dead, you cannot produce anything from it, except you resurrect it and restore it to life.”

Heber C. Kimball (1801–1868) American Mormon leader

Journal of Discourses 6:35-36 (Nov. 8, 1857)

Life , Food , Parent , Tree

“In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he'd give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.”

Mickey Spillane book I, the Jury

I, the Jury (1947)

Guy , Lying

“A bunch of money-grubbin', greenhouse-gasing, seal-clubbing, oil-drilling, Bible-thumping, missile-firing, right-to-life-ing, lethal-injecting hypocrites. People whose idea of a good time is strapping a dead panda to a Lincoln Navigator and running over everybody in the gay parade.”

Richard Jeni (1957–2007) American comedian

On the right wing
A Big, Steaming Pile Of Me

Life , Money , People , Idea

“You put me in mind of a case I ran into in the American West. A respected citizen shot a professional gunthrower in the back. When asked why he didn’t give the other chap a chance to draw, the survivor said, ‘Well, he’s dead and I’m alive and that’s how I wanted it to be.’ Jamie, if you use sportsmanship on a known scamp, you put yourself at a terrible disadvantage.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Red Planet

Source: Red Planet (1949), Chapter 10, “We’re Boxed In!”, p. 148

Chance , Drawing

“dear joe, your wild noisy huge brother is dead.
I couldn't do what my parents did:
bring two boys, four years apart through the maze.”

Michael Rosen (1946) British children's writer

Carrying the Elephant

Boy , Parent

“Thirty-two years ago, I became a vegetarian. I always thought it was a bit weird eating dead bodies even though my parents said it was all right. But I saw "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and that did it. In the movie, they're doing the same thing to people that they do to animals, and so I gradually got off eating meat…. The health thing came way later. Veganism came four years ago, and it was more of a health decision.”

Phil Collen (1957) British musician

"How Def Leppard's Phil Collen traded the booze for a better body," interview with the Los Angeles Times (27 June 2015) http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-phil-collen-def-leppard-interview-20150627-story.html.

People , Health , Way , Parent

“When somebody enrolls, consider he or she has joined up for the duration of the universe — never permit an "open-minded" approach… If they enrolled, they're aboard, and if they're aboard they're here on the same terms as the rest of us — win or die in the attempt. Never let them be half minded about being Scientologists. … When Mrs. Pattycake comes to us to be taught, turn that wandering doubt in her eye into a fixed, dedicated glare. … The proper instruction attitude is, "We'd rather have you dead than incapable."”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Scientology Policy Letters

Universe

“Maybe because I had been out very late the night before and was not able to put up my usual resistance, but it seemed to me, sitting there with the sound of his voice dying in my ears, that I could fall in love with him.
And then, as unexpected as a hidden step, I felt myself actually stumble and fall. And there it was, I was in love with him! As simple as that.
He was the first real person I’d ever been in love with. I couldn’t get over it. What I was trying to figure out was why I had never been in love with him before. I mean I’d had plenty of chance to. I’d seen him almost daily that summer in Maine two years ago when we were both in a Summer Stock company. … He was always rather nice to me in his insolent way, but there was also, I now remembered with a passing pang, an utterly ravishing girl, a model, the absolute epitome of glamour, called Lila. She used to come up at week ends to see him.
Then I heard from someone that he’d quit college the next winter and gone abroad to become a genius. I’d met him again when I first landed in Paris. He’d been very nice, bought me a drink, taken down my telephone number and never called me.
You’re a dead duck now, I told myself, as I relaxed back into my coma. You’re gone. I looked at him, smiling idly. I tried to imagine what was going on in his mind.”

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) American journalist, actress

Part One, One
The Dud Avocado (1958)

Love , Smile , Way , Imagination

“I urge everybody to stay inside the Labour Party and fight to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. There must now be a serious question over whether Frank can hope to beat Steven Norris on May 4 when Londoners will widely perceive the Labour nomination to have been stolen. The lesson of Wales is that our voters will not be taken for granted. A Labour campaign that was dead in the water from day one will limp on to polling day and never allow us to get on to the real issues that matter to Londoners, such as transport, unemployment and crime. In the interests of uniting the Labour party, I hope Frank Dobson will consider his position over the next few days. He must decide whether he is willing to accept this tainted result or stand down in the interests of Labour and London. Over the last six months Londoners have had to listen to politicians. Now it is time for politicians to listen to Londoners, and I shall be saying nothing further until I have had a chance to listen to Londoners.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Statement following the London Labour Party ballot for a Mayoral candidate, in which Livingstone was defeated by Frank Dobson due to the electoral system chosen by the party, as quoted in "Winner is challenged to refuse `tainted' victory" in The Guardian (21 February 2000), p. 2.

Hope , Question , Water , Chance

“And I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604." And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumping up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL."”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

And the Sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
Alice's Restaurant Massacree

Boy

“How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 170).

Books , Study , Past , Future

“I do not want to heap coals of fire on anyone's head, but I would like to advise those who keep the living thought of the dead hidden away in cardboard boxes, to pass on as quickly as possibly such explosive material, whose only legitimate heir is the whole world, that is to say, my neighbor.”

Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995) French musicologist

The Old Man and His Movements (Times Press, 1964)
Literary works

World , Box

“We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Foreword: Books of Blood 1-3

People , Past

“For this dead Venice once taught us to be merchants, sailors and gentlemen; and this dying England taught the Americans all they have of speech, or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds.”

John Ruskin book Fors Clavigera

Fors Clavigera,, letter xlii, ( 1 June 1874 https://archive.org/stream/forsclavigera02ruskiala#page/204/mode/2up; quoted by William Archer in America To-Day).
Fors Clavigera (1871-1878 and 1880-1884)

Bird , Learning

“Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Art

“What a disgrace to live at the beginning of the 20th century. … One is always influenced by one's own time. And ours is that of Sarah Bernhardt and Rostand. Things will be much better in another ten years. You will see a new art born, new and beautiful. You will see that, but I shall not. I shall be dead. But … Sarah Bernhardt will live forever, and go on playing L'AIGLON forever!”

Renée Vivien (1877–1909) British poet who wrote in the French language

Quoted in Mercure de France, I-XII (1953), trans. Jeannette H. Foster (1977)

Beauty , Art , Time

“The mural artist is concerned with bringing to life dead surfaces by the application of colour.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Revival of Mural Art, The Listener, August 25, 1937 Vol. XVIII. No. 450, pp. 408-409
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1930's

Life

“It cannot but occur to every person's observation, that as long as parties exist in the country (and perhaps it is for the good of the country that parties should exist to a certain degree, because they keep ministers on their guard in their conduct), they will have their friends and adherents. A great political character, who held a high situation in this country some years ago, but who is now dead, used to say that ministers were the better for being now and then a little peppered and salted. And while these parties exist, they will have their friendships and attainments, which will sometimes dispose them to wander from argument to declamation.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Holt's Case (1793), 22 How. St. Tr. 1234.

Friendship , Personality , Country

“We receive data through five portals, five windows; the house of human consciousness has but five windows. Do you imagine that we will ever perceive all through these five windows? Do you imagine that that which is most important can ever be seen? How do you describe the most important things that have ever happened to you? The moment you knew you loved her: Can you reassemble that magnetic pull with the Lego of light and language? The moment you heard he’d died—can you define it, calcify it, crystallize it, make it live again, or is it at best a kind of taxidermy that language can provide? A stuffed dead effigy with cold unseeing eyes. And Jupiter revolves. And the moon watches, the moon you saw as a child, the moon that hung in the sky when Christ was crucified, the crescent moon, like a tear in heaven as the Prophet heard Allah.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Love , Imagination , Tear , Light

“There were daily quarrels all summer. The point upon which we had our final disagreement was the decision of an offensive on the Caucasus and Stalingrad - a mistake, and Hitler didn't want to see it. I told him the Russians would put in another million men in 1942 and get another million in 1943. Hitler told me that I was an idiot - that the Russians were practically dead already. When I told Hitler about Russian armament potentials, especially for tank materials, Hitler flew into a rage of fury and threatened me with his fists.”

Franz Halder (1884–1972) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, April 12, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
Sourced Encyclopedia of the Third Reich Louis L. Snyder

Men , Decision , Rage , Summer

“Like Dead Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,
But turn to ashes on the lips.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Lalla Rookh http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/lallarookh/index.html (1817), Part V-VIII: The Fire-Worshippers

Sea

“I wanted an autograph from Northern Calloway, when we were in Stony Lodge together, I asked and was dragged away. He was the only celebrity I met as a kid. I still remember, the sheet over his face, his body on a stretcher. And the only food for thought that would feed my head was like my childhood, David from Sesame Street was dead.”

Northern Calloway (1948–1990) American actor

Cage, who was also a patient of the Stony Lodge facility where Calloway stayed briefly, in the song "Tongue in a Shark's Mouth" (2009).
About

Food , Childhood

“The question that no-one ever asks in the Pokemon world is why that long-dead illustrious and ethical human being, having created the technology to store big things in very small things, decided to use this gimmick the way he did - storing potentially deadly ferocious animals with magic powers in a little thingy that you can hang off your belt. Because he wanted the power, that's why. He wanted to know the ecstasy of holding five deadly creatures round his waist. He probably got off on that sort of thing, the sick weirdo.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Why it would kick arse to be a Pokemon trainer http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/essays/pokemon.htm
Fully Ramblomatic, Essays

World , Way , Question , Animals

“And in a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired, but our souls are rested. They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, (but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, "We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, How Long, Not Long (1965)

World , Soul , Sense

“Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.”

Theodore Parker (1810–1860) abolitionist

A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842).

Truth , Soul

“The soul that rides deep through our veins,
Our red rivers, and smiles.
This darling soul, as endearing
As dead poets and countries.
This restless soul that neighbors our hearts.
A perfect torch that guides our flames
To immortality.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

"Charity" http://www.masielalushafoundation.org/

Smile , Soul , Heart , Perfection

“Aaron is dead. Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own. Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child. Let us all weep.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

Eulogizing Aaron Swartz in W3C Mailing list (12 Jan 2013) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2013Jan/0017.html

World , Parent

“A lovers' spat," he said. "You know how it is. Boy meets girl, girl wants boy dead. An everyday story, really.”

David Gemmell book The Swords of Night and Day

Source: Drenai series, The Swords of Night and Day, Ch. 14

Girl , Boy , Lovers

“That was a time when only the dead
could smile, delivered from their wars,
and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad
dangled outside its prison-house…”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

As translated by Stanley Kunitz
In those years only the dead smiled,
Glad to be at rest:
And Leningrad city swayed like
A needless appendix to its prisons.
Translated by D. M. Thomas
Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), Prologue

War , Smile , Soul , Time

“No matter the lie, even if I was on my own, I'd have to play it. I can hear my dad saying: 'Play the ball as it lies.' Because of the way I was taught, I would feel awful about it. I don't know if that makes me dead honest or dead stupid.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Alex Salmond: The new king of Scotland http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/alex-salmond-the-new-king-of-scotland-889764.html, ' (9 August 2008)

Lie , Stupidity , Way , Feeling

“He like the Church he serves is blind and empty and vainglorious. This God they prattle on about, where’s His justice, where’s His compassion? Does it please Him to see dying people hounded in His name, does He snigger at His bumbling priests, is He satisfied when men drop dead chopping stone out for His temples, twisted little God dying tepid-faced on a cross…. She thought, I’ll go out and look for other gods, and maybe they’ll be better and anyway they can’t be worse.”

Keith Roberts book Pavane

Fourth measure “Lords and Ladies” (p. 169)
Pavane (1968)

Men , God , People , Justice

“Most of Europe has outlawed the Neo-Nazis, but the French Communist Party was from 1999 to 2002, part of a ruling government. One may not fly the swastika, but one may proudly hoist the hammer and sickle at official events. In most of Europe, the denial of Hitler's dead, or the minimization of the Nazi Holocaust, is literally a crime. The denial or minimization of communist crimes, on the other hand, is an intellectual and political art form. The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia enslaved the nation and slaughtered a fourth to a fifth of the entire Cambodian population, as if an American regime had slaughtered some 56 million to 70 million of its people.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

People , Art , Parting , Flying

“I told him, "Give up the dough, before you get smoked! Oh you broke? ( *shots* ) Now you're dead broke"”

Big L (rapper) (1974–1999) American rapper

“Class, conservatives insist, is not really about money or birth or even occupation. It is primarily a matter of authenticity, that most valuable cultural commodity. Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes. What makes one a member of the noble proletariat is not work per se, but unpretentiousness, humility, and the rest of the qualities that our punditry claims to spy in the red states that voted for George W. Bush. The nation’s producers don’t care about unemployment or a dead-end life or a boss who makes five hundred times as much as they do. No. In red land both workers and their bosses are supposed to be united in disgust with those affected college boys at the next table, prattling on about French cheese and villas in Tuscany and the big ideas for running things that they read in books.This sounds like a complicated maneuver, but it should be quite familiar after all these years. We see it in its most ordinary, run-of-the-mill variety every time we hear a conservative pundit or politician deplore "class warfare"”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

meaning any talk about the failures of free-market capitalism — and then, seconds later, hear them rail against the "media elite" or the haughty, Volvo driving "eastern establishment."
Part II: The Fury Which Passeth All Understanding, Chapter Six: Persecuted, Powerless, and Blind (pp. 113-114).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Life , Money , Boy , Idea

“The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.”

Charles Lamb book Essays of Elia

Oxford in the Vacation.
Essays of Elia (1823)

“Blue said, "I can't get in this car. Do you know what's happening behind me? I don't even want to look."
Henry said, "How about you give me the finger and shout at me now and withdraw with your principles?" He smiled winningly and held up three fingers. He counted to two with devil horns.
"This is incredibly unnecessary," Blue told him, but she could feel herself smiling.
"Life's a show," he replied. He counted one with his middle finger, and then his face melted into exaggerated shock.
Blue shouted, "Drop dead, you bastard!"
"FINE!" Henry screamed back, with slightly more hysteria than the role required. He attempted to squeal out of the lot, stopped to take off the parking brake, and then limped out more sedately."”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

pg 234
The Raven Cycle Series, The Raven King (2016)

Life , Smile , Cars , Feeling

“I hope nothing valuable may have been taken from the house in spite of you, but you know what women are—they always want to do the best they can for the man who marries them, and never give another thought to the children of their first husband, nor to their father either when he is dead and done with.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XV. 19–23 (tr. Samuel Butler).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Women , Children , Hope , Housing

“Goniface was thinking how like his own was the destiny of the whole Hierarchy and of every priest in it. Whether they murdered their families—and their own youth—actually or only in spirit, it amounted to the same thing. They betrayed and deserted them, left them for dead, to enjoy the power and pleasures of a sterile tyrant class.”

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 19 (p. 207)

Pleasure , Youth , Family , Thinking

“O poor heart, I was doomed from the start,
Doomed to play the villian's part,
I was the baddest Johnny in the apple cart,
My blood was blacker than the chambers of a dead nun's heart.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, Tender Prey (1988), Up Jumped the Devil

Heart , Parting

“Under the suffocating burden of the old things that should have passed away, the Christian consciousness forgets, at least in part, that all things are become new, and that man is risen from the dead.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.96

Parting , Forgetting

“Whoever in his public services is handcuffed and shackled by the vice of consistency will be a man not free to act as various questions come before him from time to time; he will be a statesman locked in a prison house, keys to which are in the keeping of days and events that are dead. Let me quote Emerson: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen.”

Henry Fountain Ashurst (1874–1962) United States Senator from Arizona

Johnson, James W. (2002). Arizona Politicians: The Noble and the Notorious, illustrations by David `Fitz' Fitzsimmons, University of Arizona Press. p 112.

Quotes , Question , Time , Housing

“Perhaps the biggest reason why intellectuals excoriated entertainment was that they understood all too well their own precariousness in a world dominated by it. For whatever the overt content of any particular work, entertainment as a whole promulgated an unmistakable theme, one that took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego, of Dionysian abandon of Apollonian harmony. Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.”

Neal Gabler (1950) American journalist

Source: Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998), p. 21

World , Sense

“You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms.”

Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) American photographer

Shepard, Richard F. "Roman Vishniac, 92, a Biologist And Photographer of Jews, Dies". New York Times (1859-Current file); Jan 23, 1990; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1951 - 2002) pg. D23.

Animals

“In the lap of hoary Europe lie her children ill at rest,
Reaching hands of supplication to their brethren of the West;
Pale about the lifeless fountain of their ancient freedom, wait
Till the angel move its waters and avenge their stricken state.
Let me then, a new crusader, to the eastward set my face,
Wake the fires of old tradition on each sacred altar-place,
Till a trodden people rouse them, with a clamor as divine
As the winds of autumn roaring through the clumps of forest-pine.
I myself would seize their banner; they should follow where it led,
To the triumph of the victors or the pallor of the dead.”

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) American poet, critic, and essayist

"Flood-Tide" (1860).

Children , People , Lie , Angels

“I went to Ithaca, found the Grateful Dead and my life was changed.”

David Boreanaz (1969) American actor, famous for Angel and Buffy

Interview with a vampire By Chuck Holliday http://www.ithaca.edu/ithacan/articles/9902/04/accent/boreanaz.html

Life , Change

“Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress.”

Ian McDonald book Desolation Road

Source: Desolation Road (1988), Chapter 56 (p. 276).

“Only three people," said Palmerston, "have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Strachey, Lytton. Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 1819-1901. New York Harcourt, Brace And Company, 1921 via Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1265
1860s

People , Business , Madness

“Odysseus returned at last, neither dead nor alive, somehow still attached to this ruined corpse—a spirit perhaps unwanted among spirits and forced to remain in the dead house of its body.”

Whitley Strieber book The Hunger

The Hunger (1981)

Housing

“When we are no longer young we are already dead”

Constantin Brâncuși (1876–1957) French-Romanian artist

Attributed to Brâncuși in: Rene Dubot So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events. 1998, p. 112

“O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh!
When we are dead, my best belovèd and I,
Close well above us, that we may rest forever,
Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

Source: Discordants (1916), IV

Grass

“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

Source: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 26-27 as cited in: Felix Geyer, Johannes van der Zouwen, (1994) " Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences http://www.critcrim.org/redfeather/chaos/024Weiner.htm", Kybernetes, Vol. 23 Iss: 6/7, pp.46 - 61

World , Behavior , Communication , Nature

“I myself have a great desire to watch over thy conduct, and visit the subterranean palace, which, no doubt, contains whatever can interest persons like us. There is nothing so pleasing as retiring to caverns: my taste for dead bodies, and everything like mummy, is decided.”

William Beckford book Vathek

J'aurois grande envie de voir ce palais souterrein, rempli d'objets intéressans pour les gens de notre espèce; il n'est rien que j'aime autant que les caverns; mon goût pour les cadavres & les momies est décidé.
Source: Vathek, P. 56; translation p. 34.

Personality

“Eleven dead bodies. One dead cat. No breasts.”

Joe Bob Briggs (1953) American film critic, writer, and actor; alter ego of John Bloom

This line is from a review http://www.joebobbriggs.com/drivein/1995/candyman2farewelltotheflesh.htm of Candyman II: Farewell To The Flesh
Similar "summary" lines feature in many of the reviews.
Repeated phrases

Cats

“He (Wells) closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Love , Women , Men , Country

“He was picking speed as the city spread its twinkling lights below him.
But he paid no heed as the shivering thoughts of the nights
delights went through him.
His foot nudged the brakes to slow him down.
But the pedal floored easy without a sound.
He said "Christ!"
It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now.
He was trapped inside a dead-end hellslide,
riding on his fear-hunched back
was every one of those yellow green
I'm telling you thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of bananas.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

30,000 Pounds of Bananas
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

Fear , Light , Christ , Speed

“Whatever it was that darkened the love between the uncle and his niece, their quarrels became more violent and at the end of the summer of 1931 Geli announced that she was returning to Vienna to resume her voice studies. Hitler forbade her to go. The next morning Geli Raubal was found shot dead in her room. The coroner reported that a bullet had gone through her chest below the left shoulder and penetrated the heart; it seemed beyond doubt that the shot was self-inflicted. Yet for years afterward in Munich there was murky gossip that Geli Raubal had been murdered -- by Hitler in a rage, by Himmler to eliminate a situation that had become embarrassing to the party. But no credible evidence ever turned up to substantiate such rumors.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Source: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), pp. 131,132

Love , Study , Rage , Heart

“The clarity of Socrates' situation is remarkable. … his exit is wonderfully seductive. It is calm, clear, convincing. Friends are present, wise words are said, the ethical unfolding of life is tied up in a neat package. And then he slips away, slowly becoming stone-cold from the feet up. It is our fantasy of the normal death, with the addition of social and prophetic implications, to say nothing of heroic proportions. Again, most of us will likely drop dead on a subway platform, in the middle of an orgasm or straining on a toilet seat early in the morning. The real tragedy of death may be just how often it is comic.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

On Equilibrium (2001)

Life , Death

“[…] the Eternal turned his attention to the three shades who stood humbly and yet hopefully before him. The quick, with so short a time to live, when they talk of themselves, talk too much; but the dead, with eternity before them, are so verbose that only angels could listen to them with civility.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

"The judgement seat", p. 314
Short Stories, Collected short stories 1

Angels , Time

“The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New.”

Carlos Fuentes book The Death of Artemio Cruz

Describing a Mexican baroque church
The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962)

World

“It can postpone death, cure disease, release the captive, bring sight to the blind, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, destroy the despot, win the love of women, and procure all reasonable earthly happiness to any man who is not entirely too old. In course of time perhaps it may even resurrect the dead, create life and storm the very gates of heaven, for money is force and force is the essence of the universe.”

Arthur Desmond (1859–1929) New Zealnd writer

Rival Caesars (1903)

Love , Life , Death , Women

“"They lit us up! Missiles incoming! Six count, closing, dead astern!" "Back-trace the missile lock and feed it to the computer for counter-fire." "Great idea! I'll get right on that first thing as soon as I graduate from gunnery school!"”

Matthew Stover book Shatterpoint

Nick Rostu and Mace Windu, p. 330
Shatterpoint (2004)

School , Idea

“I'm not mad that you got mad when I got mad when you said I should go drop dead.”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

tick, tick... BOOM! (1990)

Madness

“I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

"Visite" in Discours du Grand Sommeil (1920); later published in Collected Works Vol. 4 (1947)

Sadness

“Joined together with bones and sinews, having a plastering of skin and flesh, covered with hide, the body is not seen as it really is—full of intestines, full of stomach, of the lump of the liver, of bladder, of heart, of lungs, of kidneys and of spleen, of mucus, of saliva, and of sweat, and of lymph, of blood, of synovial fluid, of bile, and of fat, … and its hollow head is filled with brain. A fool, overwhelmed by ignorance, thinks of it as beautiful, but when it lies dead, swollen up and discoloured, cast away in a cemetery, relatives have no regard for it. Dogs devour it, and jackals, and wolves and worms. Crows and vultures devour it, and whatever other living creatures there are. The bhikkhu possessing knowledge here, having heard the Buddha's word, indeed understands it, for he sees the body as it really is.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

§ 194-202
Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Khuddaka Nikaya (Minor Collection), Sutta Nipata (Suttas falling down)

Beauty , Dogs , Fools , Understanding

“The traffic lights, they turn a blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags on downstream
Cause the life it lived, is, is dead”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

The Wind Cries Mary
Song lyrics, Are You Experienced? (1967)

Life , Light

“The evidence of science and history is that humans are only ever partly and intermittently rational, but for modern humanists the solution is simple: human beings must in future be more reasonable. These enthusiasts for reason have not noticed that the idea that humans may one day be more rational requires a greater leap of faith than anything in religion. Since it requires a miraculous breach in the order of things, the idea that Jesus returned from the dead is not as contrary to reason as the notion that human beings will in future be different from how they have always been.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 75)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Faith , Religion , History , Idea

“After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.”

George V of the United Kingdom (1865–1936) King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India

Statement to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, referring to his son, Edward, Prince of Wales
Quoted in Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin (1969) ch.34

Boy