Quotes about the dead (3313 quotes, page 26)

“Recently, a whole series of cases has been reported to me in which judges, lawyers, and officials of the Judiciary who are disabled war veterans and whose record in office is flawless, have been forcibly sent on leave, and are later to be dismissed for the sole reason that they are of Jewish descent.
It is quite intolerable for me personally…that Jewish officials who were disabled in the war should suffer such treatment, [especially] as, with the express approval of the government, I addressed a Proclamation to the German people on the day of the national uprising, March 21st, in which I bowed in reverence before the dead of the war and remembered in gratitude the bereaved families of the war dead, the disabled, and my old comrades at the front.
I am certain, Mr. Chancellor, that you share this human feeling, and request you, most cordially and urgently, to look into this matter yourself, and to see to it that there is some uniform arrangement for all branches of the public service in Germany.
As far as my own feelings are concerned, officials, judges, teachers and lawyers who are war invalids, fought at the front, are sons of war dead, or themselves lost sons in the war should remain in their positions unless an individual case gives reason for different treatment. If they were worthy of fighting for Germany and bleeding for Germany, then they must also be considered worthy of continuing to serve the Fatherland in their professions.”

Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and president of Germany

Letter to Chancellor Adolf Hitler http://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/hindenburg-and-hitler-on-jewish-war-veterans/, (April 4th 1933)
President

War , People , Family , Feeling

“What decent person would want to spend a life picking and cavilling? Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"… you know'.”

Stephen Fry book Paperweight

On critics, from "Paperweight", 2006. <sup> http://wongablog.co.uk/2006/07/14/stephen-fry-on-critics/</sup>
2000s

Life , People , Soul , Painting

“He was a soldier and he marched where he was ordered to march and he killed the king's enemies when he arrived. That was his job and the army was his home and he loved both even though he knew he would have to fight like a gutter-born bastard for every step of advancement that other men took for granted. And he knew too that he would never be prized for his birth or his wit or his wealth, but would only be reckoned as good as his last fight, but that thought made him smile. For Sharpe's last battle had been against the best soldier France had and Sharpe had drowned the bastard like a rat. Sharpe had won, Loup was dead, and it was over at last: Sharpe's battle.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Captain Richard Sharpe, p. 354
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Battle (1995)

Love , Men , Smile , Home

“At the piping of all hands,
When the judgment-signal's spread—
When the islands and the lands
And the seas give up their dead,
And the South and North shall come;
When the sinner is dismayed,
And the just man is afraid,
Then Heaven be thy aid,
Poor Tom.”

John Gardiner Calkins Brainard (1795–1828) American writer

Lament for Long Tom, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Sea

“In shapeless clumps the ferns are brown and dead
Among the fir-trees dusk is swiftly born:
The maples will be desolate by morn
The last word of the summer has been said”

Francis Joseph Sherman (1871–1926) Canadian writer

"October" (sonnet) http://www.sonnets.org/shermanf.htm

Tree , Summer

“It’s all PR,” said Hutchins. “If we ever produced a person who was unrelentingly honest, everybody would want him dead.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Cauldron (2007), Chapter 13 (p. 127)

Personality

“Are angels my attendants? Then I should walk worthy of ray companionship. Am I so soon to go and dwell with angels? Then I should be pure. Are these feet so soon to tread the courts of heaven? Is this tongue so soon to unite with heavenly beings in praising God? Are these eyes so soon to look on the throne of eternal glory, and on the ascended Redeemer? Then these feet and eyes and lips should be pure and holy; and I should be dead to the world, and live for heaven.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 316.

God , World , Angels

“In a time of sickness with the pleurisy, a little upward of two years and a half ago, I was brought so near the gates of death that I forgot my name. Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of matter of a dull, gloomy color, between the south and the east; and was informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be and live; and that I was mixed in with them, and that henceforth I might not consider myself as a distinct or separate being. In this state I remained several hours. I then heard a soft, melodious voice, more pure and harmonious than any I had heard with my ears before; I believed it was the voice of an angel, who spake to the other angels. The words were: “John Woolman is dead.””

John Woolman (1720–1772) American Quaker preacher

I soon remembered that I once was John Woolman, and being assured that I was alive in the body, I greatly wondered what that heavenly voice could mean.
Source: The Journal of John Woolman (1774), p. 164 ( online http://books.google.nl/books?id=qPspAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA164)

Death , Angels , Color , Time

“These people are not interested in creative destruction, they are only interested in destruction. That leads to gas chambers. That leads to, uh, guillotines. That leads to millions dead. That leads to Mao. That leads to totalitarianism. Every. Single. Time.”

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

The Glenn Beck Program
Radio
Premiere Radio Networks
2011-10-04
Beck: Occupy Wall Street Is "Only Interested In Destruction," Which "Leads To Gas Chambers," "Guillotines," "Mao"
Media Matters for America
2011-10-04
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201110040017
2011-08-13
regarding Occupy Wall Street protests
2010s, 2011

People , Time

“We do not mechanically connect the sensation of white with the idea of light, any more than we connect the sensation of black with the idea of darkness. We admit that a black jewel, even if of a dead black, may be more luminous than the white or pink satin of its case. Loving light, we refuse to measure it, and we avoid the geometrical ideas of the focus and the ray, which imply the repetition-contrary to the principle of variety which guides us-of bright planes and sombre intervals in a given direction. Loving colour, we refuse to limit it, and subdued or dazzling, fresh or muddy, we accept all the possibilities contained between the two extreme points of the spectrum, between the cold and the warm tone.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

1910s, Du Cubisme (1912)

Love , Idea , Light

“Hasslehoff, your liver is so shriveled, black, and dead. If you put your ear to your side you can hear it going "What you talking bout Willis."”

Greg Giraldo (1965–2010) American comedian

David Hasslehoff Comedy Central Roast (2010)

“All lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love;
No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love.”

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) Novelist, poet, writer, activist

At last.

Love , Angels , Sleep , Past

“We are in the process of seeing the fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe's prophecy in which the painter, impassioned by his mistress-model and also by his art, "did not want to see that the colors he spread on his canvas were taken from the cheeks of the woman seated beside him. And when several weeks had passed, and very little remained to be done, nothing but a stroke on the mouth and a glaze over the eye, the mistress’s spirit still flickered like the flame at the base of a lamp. Then he put on the final touch, put the glaze in place, and for a moment the painter stood in ecstasy before the work he had finished. But a moment later, he was struck with panic, and shouting with a piercing voice: ‘It is truly Life itself,’ he suddenly turned around to look at his mistress. She was dead."”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images.
J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 208
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

Life , Art , Color

“When I awoke in the morning, my mother and Julia Hislop were whispering in a corner. They didn't have to tell me why. I already knew that my father was dead. And when the feeling of peace wore off, the surprise at having known intensified my sense of loss and sorrow. Although I was only nine, I could imagine what death meant. I knew he was gone forever.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On the death of her father, p. 18.
Autobiography

Death , Peace , Feeling , Imagination

“The sea raises you to your feet. And dead calm.
Strands of light hold your hand. Now you have left
this shore. Now you are in the wind of an invisible sail.”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

Mirkka Rekola, Kuka lukee kanssasi (Who is Reading with You), 1990; Translated by Sari Hantula. Quoted at Mirkka Rekola http://www.electricverses.net/sakeet.php?poet=22&poem=645&language=3, at electricverses.net, accessed 20-03-2017.

Light , Sea

“What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

Peace , Silence

“As long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

"On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)

“So you play your albums and you smoke your pot
And you meet your girlfriend in the parking lot
Oh, but still you're aching for the things you haven't got,
What went wrong?
And if you can't understand why your world is so dead
And why you've got to keep in style and feed your head
Well, you're twenty one and still you mother makes your bed
And that's too long.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Captain Jack.
Song lyrics, Piano Man (1973)

World , Understanding

“In one of his many public statements, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Montenegrin Radovan Karadžić, said the Serbs in the past period, when everyone was on their side, had been subjected to "genocidal extermination" whereas now, over the last year, when so many are against them, they are suffering the least. Of all the innumerable absurdities and untruths that have been uttered, this statement truly takes the cake. For more than forty years Bosnia was inhabited by Bosnians, and we did not distinguish between Serbs, Muslim, and Croats, or at least such distinctions were not paramount in their mutual relations. Throughout that period, to the best of the Yugoslav and world public's knowledge, there were no detenction camps for Serbs in Bosnia, no brothels for Serbs women, no Serbian children had their throat cut. (…) But according to Karadzic, the Serbs were somehow unhappy then. And now, in war, with so many dead, (…) now, according to their leader, the time has come when they are suffering the least. (…) Ethnically pure states are an impossibility in today's world, and it is ridiculous to try to create and maintain such a state, even when there is just one nation.”

Mirjana Markovic (1942–2019) Serbian politician

In her newspaper column, on 20 January 1993, cited in Night and Day: A Diary, 1995, pp.17-18

Women , War , Children , World

“Skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious — indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief — how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration — near infinite — of natural impulses? Yes, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

"How Is It Possible to Believe in God?" on NPR Morning Edition (23 May 2005) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4656595.

Life , Quotes , Star , Nature

“You are a most excellent lawyer, for a dead man.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Paladin of Souls

Source: Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 296

“I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.”

Nadine Gordimer book The Late Bourgeois World

The Late Bourgeois World (1966) (first lines)

“As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Life , Death , Children , Sex

“We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 29

Life , Hostility , World , Education

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Introduction (p. vi)
The Warlord of the Air (1971)

“Dead labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

Source: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992), Chapter 7: "Fanged noumenon (passion of the cyclone)", p. 79

Death

“That any should suffer forever, lingering on in hopeless despair, and rolling amidst infinite torments without the possibility of alleviation and without end; that since God can save men and will save a part, he has not proposed to save all — these are real, not imaginary, difficulties… My whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me why sin came into the world; why the earth is strewn with the dying and the dead; and why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects, that has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind… I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers — upon death-beds and grave-yards — upon the world of woe filled with hosts to suffer for ever: when I see my friends, my family, my people, my fellow citizens when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and danger — and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned, and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he does not do so, I am stuck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise it.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Practical Sermons Designed for Vacant Congregations and Families (1841), Sermon VIII : God Is Worthy of Confidence, p. 123.

Death , Men , God , People

“Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Life , People , Fear , Fools

“Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 1

Wisdom , Thinking , Time , Past

“My old cat is dead,
Who would butt me with his head.”

Henry Summers (1911–2005) British civil servant

"My Old Cat", as given in The Nation's Favourite Twentieth Century Poems, pub. BBC, 1999

Cats

“Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind. Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather. were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.
So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back — is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians… maybe one or two of 'em… were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still there.”

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

An American Prayer (1978)

Death , Fear , Cars , Soul

“One thing you must know: Just as there is no comparison between actually hearing the sound of harp-strings sweetly plucked and listening to someone talking about it, so too there is no comparison between words which are received in pure grace, issuing from a living heart, spoken by living lips, and those self-same words committed to dry parchment — especially words in German. For these somehow grow chill, losing their vitality like roses cut. For the enchanting melody which, more than anything else, moves human hearts, then fades away, so that the words are received now into the dryness of dry hearts. No harp-strings were ever so sweet but, when stretched across dry timber, they fall silent. An unloving heart can no more understand a love-filled speaker than a German an Italian. Therefore, an eager enquirer should hasten to the out-flowing streams of these sweet teachings so that she may see and observe them at their source in all its living and wondrous beauty – that is, the in-flowing of present grace which is able to restore dead hearts to life.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom

Love , Life , Beauty , Understanding

““You want a motive, William? I’ve got a motive. Vengeance may not be a pretty word, but it’s what’s expected of us.”
“Right!” said Sverre. “We owe it to all those millions of dead people to make more millions of dead people. Be careful how you rewrite strategic doctrine, General, or you’ll come out of this war without a single medal.””

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

Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 7, “In Which Our Hero Makes a Strategic Decision and Acquires a Reason Not to Curse God and Die” (p. 80)

War , People , Motivation

“Tolstoy, the Russian writer, said in War and Peace: “I cannot conceive of a man not being free unless he is dead.” While this statement sounds a bit exaggerated, it gets at a basic truth. What Tolstoy is saying in substance is that the absence of freedom is the presence of death. Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual who is not concerned about his freedom commits an act of moral and spiritual suicide.”

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

[http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol5/17July1959_AddressattheFiftiethAnnualNAACPConvention.pdf Address at the Fiftieth Annual NAACP Convention (17 July 1959)
1950s

Death , War , Truth , Peace

“He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one actually sees him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”

Albert Camus book The Plague

The Plague (1947)

Death , War , Disease , Imagination

“The only sure mode of acquiring sound ideas of our relation to the Creator is to begin with the study of ourselves, and to view God as a Father and Friend, dealing with us in precisely the same way as we would deal with others over whom we exercise authority. Conscience, that infallible Mentor "that sticketh closer than a brother," tells us that we are responsible beings; and in the domestic, as well as the social circle, we speedily feel the discipline and learn the lesson of rewards and punishments. The law written in man's heart points to the past as pregnant with events which may affect the future; and in the earnestness of his aspirations, and the activity of his search, he is gradually led to the mysterious history of his race. He learns that on tables of stone have been engraven the same law to which his heart responded; -that when all were dead, one died for all; and in the contemplation of the great sacrifice, he obtains a solution of the interesting problem of his individual destiny. The Sacred record which is now his guide, speaks to him of fore-knowledge and predestination, while, in perfect consistency, it records the ministration of descending spirits, and the holier communings of God with man. The Divine decrees no longer perplex him. They transcend, indeed, his Reason - but that Reason, the faithful interpreter of Conscience, does not falter in proclaiming the Freedom of his Will, and the Responsibility of his Actions.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

Review of Vestiges (1845)

God , Faith , Law , Way

“Through butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals' lives precede and enable the existence of meat. If animals are alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food.”

Carol J. Adams book The Sexual Politics of Meat

The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 40.

Food , Animals

““Do you have any papers for Will Barrent?”
“None,” the lawyer said. “His case is in different hands. I’m afraid it might not be completely processed until after the Games are over.”
“But I’ll probably be dead then,” Barrent said.
“That, I can assure you, won’t stop the papers from being properly served,” the fat lawyer said proudly. “Dead or alive, you will retain all your rights.””

Robert Sheckley book The Status Civilization

Source: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 18 (p. 77)

Game

“I like my women in a few wisps of drapery: then I can hope for a chance to remove the wisps. If they start out with nothing I tend to get depressed because either they have just stripped off for someone else or, in my line of work, they are usually dead.”

Lindsey Davis book The Silver Pigs

The Silver Pigs

Women , Hope , Chance

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

1870s

God , World , Law , Hope

“Corpses shouldn’t be forced to answer questions. Death was man’s ancient privilege, his immemorial pact with life, granted to the slave as well as the noble. Death was man’s solace, and his right. But perhaps they had revoked that right; and now you couldn’t evade your responsibilities simply by being dead.”

Robert Sheckley book Immortality, Inc.

Source: Immortality, Inc. (1959), Chapter 2 (p. 7)

Life , Death , Question

“The heterodox current in Judaism led by Jesus seems to have had no notion of an immortal soul, created by God and then infused into the body: immortality meant being raised from the dead in the body one had in life, then living for ever in a world without decay or corruption. In the Christian religion invented by Paul and Augustine, which was strongly influenced by Plato, immortality meant something quite different – a life out of time, enjoyed by the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of the departed. How this Platonic immortality could preserve anything like the persons that once lived was not made clear.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Cross-correspondences (pp. 32-3)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Life , God , World , Religion

“The History of Institutions cannot be mastered – can scarcely be approached – without an effort. It affords little of the romantic incident or of the picturesque grouping which constitute the charm of History in general, and holds out small temptation to the mind that requires to be tempted to the study of Truth. But it…abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realisation of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. For the roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is.”

William Stubbs (1825–1901) English historian and clergyman

The Constitutional History of England (1873-8; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903) vol. 1, p. iii.

Life , Truth , Lie , History

“There are great numbers of people to whom the act of reading a book — any sort of book — is wondrous; they speak of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use otherwise when referring to pregnant women, or the newly dead.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Women , People , Books , Reading

“I love America. I'm not moving. It's cool. I just don't like seeing dead people.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, NATIONALISM

Love , People

“If you're not working, you might as well be dead.”

T.C. Boyle (1948) American novelist and short story writer

Acts of God (1989)

“{Music symbolizes the loss of faith, of common belief. ] The small, intimate church is closed, the organs are dead, it is sadder than before. Only those whom fate designs for the eternal mass of infinite love remain. They compose only a very small chapel of clarity in space and time.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) French writer

45
Mea culpa; suivi de la vie et l'oeuvre de Semmelweis (1937)

Love , Fate , Faith , Music

“You cannot fight unreason, and as these dead multitudes will tell you — are telling you right now — certitude is the enemy.”

Steven Erikson book The Bonehunters

The Bonehunters (2006)

Fight

“I thank you doctor, but I am a dead man.”

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

To a doctor treating his wound. Quoted in John Whitcomb, Claire Whitcomb "Real Life at the White House", Routledge, 2002, p. 177
1880s

“Talking to yourself is a sign of madness. Talking to yourself, dead, is class.”

Tom Holt book Paint Your Dragon

c. 12
Paint Your Dragon (1996)

Madness

“Ninety percent of them [artists in general] are forgotten ten minutes after they’re dead.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1941 - 1967
Source: a letter to Margaret McKellar, 14 November 1965; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984

“It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed."”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
Page 195
Culture of Complaint (1993)

Life , Death , Money , Fate

“Thus, Grünendahl has noted Pollock's tendency to develop broad narratives without any supporting evidence. Moreover, he draws attention to Pollock's messianism in promoting American scholarship…., casting doubt on Pollock's attempt to analyse Sanskrit objectively. He raises the pertinent question as to whether Pollock is providing the intellectual foundations for America's 'New Raj', to replace the dead British Raj - i. e., whether American imperialism is replacing the dead British imperialism.”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

Question , Support , Drawing

“I didn't feel like asking him if there were any other ways to have babies. For some reason the most important thing to me was actually seeing the baby come out of you yourself and making sure it was yours. I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might just as well stay awake. I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over — dead white, of course, with no makeup and form the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 6

Pain , Smile , Way , Feeling

“The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive.”

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) novelist

Inside cover of "The Grateful Dead" LP (1967)

Light

“Godzilla is the ultimate culmination of the "who cares about plot" summer movie. A loose remake of the 1954 "classic" Japanese monster movie, Godzilla, King of the Monsters (which is itself pretty thin in the story department), Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's big-budget lizard-stomps-Manhattan disaster flick has been written with the brain dead in mind. The script isn't just "dumbed down," it's lobotomized. Godzilla lives and dies on special effects alone.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=58 of Godzilla (1998).
One-and-a-half star reviews

Summer

“It would be premature to suggest that the nation-state is dead or dying.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

p, 125
War and Change in World Politics (1981)

“Julian read the Bible as if it were a work of contemporary fiction, open to criticism or even revision. Once, when I queried him about the purpose of his unusual reinterpretations, he said to me, “I want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 126-127

Life , Wisdom , Pleasure , Knowledge

“Only a dead nation remembers its heroes when they die. Real nations respect them when they are alive.”

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–1988) Indian independence activist

Zareef, Adil Saturday, (January 28, 2006) The Demise of a Dream. The Daily Times https://archive.is/20130416144347/www.dailytimes.com.pk/print.asp?page=2006%5C01%5C28%5Cstory_28-1-2006_pg7_35

“If we copy, the thing never looks right [and] the same occurs with regard to those buildings which do not profess to be copies; both they and the copies want spirit. They are dead bodies… We are at our wits.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

William Burges "Art and Religion", in: The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day, Orby Shipley ed., London, 1868, pp. 574-98; As cited in: John Pemble. Venice rediscovered. Clarendon Press, 16 mrt. 1995. p. 133

“There is one wonderful thing about the dead people that were raised—we do not hear of them any more. What became of them? If there was a man in this city who had been raised from the dead, I would go to see him to-night. I would say, “Where were you when you got the notice to come back? What kind of a country is it? What kind of opening there for a young man? How did you like it? Did you meet there the friends you had lost? Is there a world without death, without pain, without a tear? Is there a land without a grave, and where good-bye is never heard?””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Orthodoxy (1884)

Death , Pain , People , World

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating. There was a widespread myth of the 1970s, a myth along Tom Kuhn’s (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions lines. The Keynesianism, which worked so well in Camelot and brought forth a long epoch of price-level stability with good Q growth and nearly full employment, gave way to a new and quite different macro view after 1966. A new paradigm, monistic monetarism, so the tale narrates, gave a better fit. And therefore King Keynes lost self esteem and public esteem. The King is dead. Long live King Milton!
Contemplate the true facts. Examine 10 prominent best forecasting models 1950 to 1980: Wharton, Townsend–Greenspan, Michigan Model, St. Louis Reserve Bank, Citibank Economic Department under Walter Wriston’s choice of Lief Olson, et cetera. … M did matter as for almost everyone. But never did M alone matter systemically, as post-1950 Friedman monetarism professed.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

New millennium, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson, 2003

Way

““Bay City public prosecutor’s office wants to subpoena a Catholic who’s in storage. Pivotal witness. The Vatican says she’s already dead, and in the hands of God. They’re calling it blasphemy.”
“I see. So your loyalties are pretty undivided here.”
She stopped and turned to face me.
“Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organization in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practice birth control, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries.””

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 2 (pp. 24-25)

God , Hate , History , Birth

“On September 16, 1978, there was an eclipse of the moon in Riyadh. Late one afternoon it became visible: a dark shadow moving slowly across the face of the pale moon in the darkening blue sky. There was a frantic knocking on the door. When I opened it, our neighbor asked if we were safe. He said it was the Day of Judgement, when the Quran says the sun will rise from the west and the seas will flood, when all the dead will rise and Allah's angels will weigh our sins and virtue, expediting the good to Paradise and the bad to Hell. Though it was barely twilight, the muezzin suddenly called for prayer--not one mosque calling carefully after another, as they usually did, but all the mosques clamoring all at once, all over the city. There was shouting across the neighborhood. When I looked outside I saw people praying in the street.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Ch. 3

People , Angels , Hell , Sun

“Life… becomes an anomalous puzzle that cannot be "explained" until scientists in laboratories find a way to animate the dead matter that is the normal condition of things. This amounts to saying that life has no "place" in the world until men—the gender that originally dominated the world and still does—can create it… in a laboratory and express it in a formula. Only then will we "understand" what life is.”

Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature

Life , Men , World , Way

“Our journey had advanced;
Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being's road,
Eternity by term.

Our pace took sudden awe,
Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between,
The forest of the dead.

Retreat was out of hope,—
Behind, a sealed route,
Eternity's white flag before,
And God at every gate.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Time and Eternity, p. 213
Collected Poems (1993)

God , Hope

“A cemetery is an affront to the rational mind. One reason is its eerily wasted space, this tribute to the dead that inevitably degenerates into ancestor worship as, on birthdays and anniversaries, humans of every faith and no faith at all brave whatever weather may that day threaten, in order to stand before these rows of silent stone markers, praying, yes, and remembering, of course, but very often actually speaking to the deceased, an oddly pagan ritual in which we engage, this shared pretense that the rotted corpses in warped wooden boxes are able to hear and understand us if we stand before their graves.The other reason a cemetery appeals to the irrational side is its obtrusive, irresistible habit of sneaking past the civilized veneer with which we cover the primitive planks of our childhood fears. When we are children, we know that what our parents insist is merely a tree branch blowing in the wind is really the gnarled fingertip of some horrific creature of the night, waiting outside the window, tapping, tapping, tapping, to let us know that, as soon as our parents close the door and sentence us to the gloom which they insist builds character, he will lift the sash and dart inside and…And there childhood imagination usually runs out, unable to give shape to the precise fears that have kept us awake and that will, in a few months, be forgotten entirely. Until we next visit a cemetery, that is, when, suddenly, the possibility of some terrifying creature of the night seems remarkably real.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 50, Again Old Town, I

Children , Fear , Faith , Imagination

“The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended—stopped and held.”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

On Receiving News of the War (1914), Dead Man's Dump (1916)

Men , Pain , Lie , Time

“I hate to use that term [iPad Killer] since the iPad is probably dead anyway.”

John C. Dvorak (1952) US journalist and radio broadcaster

No Agenda podcast #177 (February 2010) http://www.noagendashow.com
2010s

Hate

“One day, when spring has gone and youth has fled,
The Maiden and the flowers will both be dead.”

Cao Xueqin book Dream of the Red Chamber

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 27

Youth , Spring , Flowers

“Reacher hated turning back. He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever. Everyone's life needed an organizing principle, and relentless forward motion was Reacher's.”

Lee Child book Nothing to Lose

Nothing to Lose, Ch. 2 (2008).

Life , Hate

“Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.”

Tim Powers book Expiration Date

Source: Expiration Date (1995), Chapter 6 (p. 44)

Books

“In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope – to find that painting did not really exist. Or to coin a modern phrase, painting.... was dead. The awakening had a exaltation of a revolution. It was that awakening that inspired the aspiration – the high purpose – quite a different thing from ambition – to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before. It was that naked revolutionary moment that made painters out of painters.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

in Jackson Pollock: An Artists Symposium, ARTnews Vol. 66 no. 2 April 1967; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, pp. 147-148
1960 - 1970

Hope , Painting

“We must stand together to counter Islamization. We must speak the truth and defend our civilization. If we fail to do so, we will end up either enslaved or dead.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

"DECKER: 5 Questions with Geert Wilders", The Washington Times (14 September 2012) http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/14/geert-wilders-5-questions-with-decker/
2010s

Truth

“Sexual desire has to be dead as a doornail before a man and a woman can be genuinely at peace in a platonic relationship.”

Susan Howatch book The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 6: Hal

Peace

“The dead don't die. They look on and help.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Letter to John Middleton Murry (2 February 1923)

Help

“When you look at nations today like England, in which great revivals occurred generations ago, there's very little vestige of Christianity left in public life. The Church, by and large, is dead, with only pockets of small Bible-believing churches struggling to make an impact on what's now a very pagan culture.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Did Eve really have an Extra Rib?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2002)

Life

“In a society where there is no freedom of the press, it is difficult for victims to be noticed. Just take the example from yesterday: I had given a telephone interview to CNN. Then, suddenly, CNN was shut down for a couple of minutes. It was the first time I experienced that my television went totally dead. I realized: Oh my God, it’s because of me. This is crazy! Which nation would do that? Maybe Cuba, North Korea, China. But what do they want, what are they so afraid of?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei Does Not Feel Powerful, 2011

God , Freedom , Time

“The prisoners who saved themselves were not the best, the predestined to good, the bearers of a message: what I had seen and experienced showed the exact opposite. Survived the worst of preference, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray area', the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were, nor are there in human affairs, certain rules), but was also a rule. I felt so innocent, but trooped among the saved, and therefore constantly looking for an excuse, before me and the others. Survived the worst, that is the most suitable; the best are all dead.”

Primo Levi book The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Selfishness

“Each lonely scene shall thee restore;
For thee the tear be duly shed;
Beloved till life can charm no more,
And mourn'd till Pity’s self be dead.”

William Collins (1721–1759) English poet, born 1721

Source: Dirge (1744), line 21.

Life , Tear

“1) We want our loved ones' sacrifices to be honored by bringing our nation's sons and daughters home from the travesty that is Iraq IMMEDIATELY, since this war is based on horrendous lies and deceptions. Just because our children are dead, why would we want any more families to suffer the same pain and devastation that we are.”

Cindy Sheehan (1957) American antiwar activist

2005

Love , Pain , War , Children

“In the middle of the floor lay a skeleton, every vestige of flesh gone from the bones to which still clung the mildewed and moldered remnants of what had once been clothing. Upon the bed lay a similar gruesome thing, but smaller, while in a tiny cradle near-by was a third, a wee mite of a skeleton.
To none of these evidences of a fearful tragedy of a long dead day did little Tarzan give but passing heed. His wild jungle life had inured him to the sight of dead and dying animals, and had he known that he was looking upon the remains of his own father and mother he would have been no more greatly moved.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles

Life , Fear , Animals , Clothes

“I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art.… (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) 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 , Painting , Personality , Indifference

“I came to claim my kingdom and you refused me because I was not one of you. Now I am one of you, my subjects, we are bound by blood, and I deserve to be your king. Your sins and your remorse, your mighty anguish, I take all upon myself. Fear your dead no more, they are my dead.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Orestes, Act 3
The Flies (1943)

Fear

“I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ…. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Letter to his mother (July 15, 1956) as quoted in Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997) by Jon Lee Anderson ISBN 0802116000

Christ , Fight

“I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow leopard waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Letter to John Middleton Murry (3 October 1924)

Autumn , Waiting , Heart

“According to a new study, women in satisfying marriages are less likely to develop cardiovascular diseases than unmarried women. So don't worry, lonely women, you'll be dead soon.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

citation needed

Women , Marriage , Disease , Study

“Let us look for a moment at the erroneous interpretations given to the Gospel story. The symbolism of that Gospel story — an ancient story-presentation often presented down the ages, prior to the coming of the Christ in Palestine — has been twisted and distorted by theologians until the crystalline purity of the early teaching and the unique simplicity of the Christ have disappeared in a travesty of errors and in a mummery of ritual, money and human ambitions. Christ is pictured today as having been born in an unnatural manner, as having taught and preached for three years and then as having been crucified and eventually resurrected, leaving humanity in order to "sit on the right hand of God," in austere and distant pomp. Likewise, all the other approaches to God by any other people, at any time and in any country, are regarded by the orthodox Christian as wrong approaches […] Every possible effort has been made to force orthodox Christianity on those who accept the inspiration and the teachings of the Buddha or of others who have been responsible for preserving the divine continuity of revelation. The emphasis has been, as we all well know, upon the "blood sacrifice of the Christ" upon the Cross and upon a salvation dependent upon the recognition and acceptance of that sacrifice. The vicarious at-one-ment has been substituted for the reliance which Christ Himself enjoined us to place upon our own divinity; the Church of Christ has made itself famous and futile (as the world war proved) for its narrow creed, its wrong emphases, its clerical pomp, its spurious authority, its material riches and its presentation of a dead Christ. His resurrection is accepted, but the major appeal of the churches has been upon His death.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), Chapter IV: The Work of the Christ Today and in the Future, p. 64

Death , Money , God , War

“We're going to get bin Laden. Dead or alive, it doesn't matter to me.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

12/14/2001 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1711874.stm Bush's words elsewhere was that he is "determined" to capture Bin Laden dead or alive, and is confident about succeeding http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1711717.stm
2000s, 2001

“What is the matter with you?' I asked. 'Be a man and tell me; is the President dead?' My prophetic soul told me that must be so. It was some time before the man could speak. At length he stammered out, 'Assassinated!' and then I knew I had come too late. I might, perhaps, have saved his life with my persistent precautions, which he did not at all object to. I should have been about him until all excitement was over, and would have impressed the Cabinet with the necessity of guarding his person. I am not now, and never have been, given to great emotions; but when I heard of Mr. Lincoln's cruel death I was completely unmanned. I went immediately to Washington and saw him as he lay in his grave-clothes; the same benevolent face was there, but the kindly smile had departed from his lips, and the soft, gentle eyes were closed for ever.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 319

Life , Death , Smile , Soul

“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.”

Jim Hightower (1943) Texas author and liberal political activist

Americans who tell the truth http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Jim_Hightower.html, portrait.

Courageous , Courage , Fish

“The gunner tends to live with Death without giving thought to dying, the shot heard so deeply it is not heard at all. The gunner is the grouse while the grouse is living; he dies a little when the grouse is dead. They have that in common, the bird and he, and he had better know if he is worthy to terminate that glorious life. It is a responsibility not easy to face, yet he doesn't dare not face it.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

Grouse Along the Tramroad (1986)

Life , Death , Bird

“A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hellAnd bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

Love , Children , Flowers

“I am fundamentally a dead man: one fundamentally a Peel–Cobden man.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to James Bryce (5 December 1896), quoted in Andrew Marrison (ed.), Free Trade and its Reception 1815-1960: Freedom and Trade: Volume One (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 209.
1890s

“Ninety-nine percent of what my father ever wrote or said about himself to the press, the media, the public and the membership is totally and completely untrue and false. So therefore that old phrase "Consider the source" cannot just be applied to me but must be applied to him also. And this phrase, "Consider the source" is in itself totally and completely inaccurate and is only a statement to dead-agent both myself and my father— or anyone else for that matter. What is appropriate, true and accurate is: "Consider the facts and consider the truth."”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

Taped Message (1984)

Truth , Falseness

“We’ve met, and it wasn’t the highlight of my being dead.”

Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist

Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 29, “Choice and Sacrifice” (p. 265)

“Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

Source: A Grief Observed (1961), Ch. 1

Search , Learning , Time

“King Pandion, he is dead,
All thy friends are lapped in lead.”

Richard Barnfield (1574–1627) English poet

Ode, l. 23.
Poems: In Divers Humours (1598)

“Old Grimes is dead, that good old man
We never shall see more;
He used to wear a long black coat
All buttoned down before.”

Albert Gorton Greene (1802–1868) American judge

Old Grimes, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: Compare: "John Lee is dead, that good old man,— / We ne'er shall see him more; / He used to wear an old drab coat / All buttoned down before", Inscription in Matherne Churchyard, To the memory of John Lee, who died May 21, 1823; "Old Abram Brown is dead and gone,— / You'll never see him more; / He used to wear a long brown coat / That buttoned down before", James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Nursery Rhymes of England, p. 60.

“Mine enemy is growing old,—
I have at last revenge.
The palate of the hate departs;
If any would avenge,—

Let him be quick, the viand flits,
It is a faded meat.
Anger as soon as fed is dead;
’T is starving makes it fat.”

Emily Dickinson Life, and Death, and Giants —

Life, p. 38
Collected Poems (1993)

Hate , Revenge , Anger

Quotes about the dead page 26

Quotes about the dead
page 26