Quotes about the dead
page 28

Sri Aurobindo photo
Ken Dodd photo

“Did you know that a laugh is something that comes out of a hole in your face? Anywhere else and you're in dead trouble!”

Ken Dodd (1927–2018) English comedian, singer-songwriter and actor

Quoted in Manchester Evening News, http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/entertainment/comedy/s/234/234894_dodds_bolton_bonus.htmlDodd's Bolton bonus, Natalie Anglesey. (2008-04-28)

Aldo Leopold photo

“The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. … The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.”

“November: A Mighty Fortress”, p. 77.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "November: Axe-in-Hand," "November: A Mighty Fortress," and "December: Pines above the Snow"

Jean Paul Sartre photo
Charles Darwin photo

“Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. — Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind? — animals with affections, imitation, fear of death, pain, sorrow for the dead.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

respect.
" Notebook B http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html" (1837-1838) page 231 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=233&itemID=CUL-DAR121.-&viewtype=side
quoted in [2009, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution, Adrian Desmond & James Moore, New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 9780547055268, 23042290M, 115, http://books.google.com/books?id=V9cGkBj_8iYC&pg=PA115&dq="Animals+whom+we+have+made+our+slaves"]
Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements

Stephen Fry photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Jodie Marsh photo

“For quite a while I did feel like my brain wasn't being used at all. Obviously, when you're just modelling, you do feel a bit almost brain-dead, where you need something to stimulate you mentally and you're not getting it.”

Jodie Marsh (1978) English glamour model and television personality

Interview in The Guardian, 25 January 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jan/25/broadcasting.bigbrother

Sun Myung Moon photo

“The democratic world has come to a dead end; likewise, the communist world has come to a dead end. But the Unification Church is just beginning!”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Creation Of The Fatherland, 1984-01-01 http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/sunmyungmoon84/840101.htm

Albert Einstein photo

“To think with fear of the end of one's life is pretty general with human beings. It is one of the means nature uses to conserve the life of the species. Approached rationally that fear is the most unjustified of all fears, for there is no risk of any accidents to one who is dead or not yet born. In short, the fear is stupid but it cannot be helped.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Eileen Danniheisser (1953), quoted in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel by Banesh Hoffman (1973), p. 261 http://books.google.com/books?id=sdDaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22think+with+fear%22#search_anchor. The exact date, or the name of his correspondent, is not given in the snippet of the book available online, but the quote appears after the letter to the Queen of Belgium from 12 January 1953, and is prefaced by "Nine months later, in words that recall the beliefs of an early atomic speculator, the Roman poet Lucretius, Einstein had written to an inquirer", followed by the quote. The name "Eileen Danniheisser" is given in Time: Volume 144, where it is mentioned in the snippets here http://books.google.com/books?id=JDAnAQAAIAAJ&q=%22obsessive+thoughts%22#search_anchor and here http://books.google.com/books?id=JDAnAQAAIAAJ&q=%22think+with+fear%22#search_anchor that she had written Einstein "about her obsessive thoughts of death as a child".
1950s

“Intelligent Design is simply a dead end; it does not deserve to be called a theory.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 2, “Just a Theory: What Scientists Do” (p. 41)

Uwe Boll photo

“House of the Dead 2 I gave away. Alone in the Dark 2 I will also not do; even if the DVD movie made money. BloodRayne 2 in the Wild West is what I really want to do.”

Uwe Boll (1965) German restaurateur and former filmmaker

Uwe Boll Talks Bloodrayne, Dungeon Siege, Postal and More., 2006-06-13, Gareth Von Kallenbach, sknr.net, 2006-03-03 http://sknr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=67,
2000s

Lope De Vega photo

“But life is short: while one lives, everything is lacking; when one is dead, everything is superfluous.”

Pero la vida es corta:
viviendo, todo falta;
muriendo, todo sobra.
Act III, sc. vii. Translation from Arthur Terry Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry (Cambridge: CUP, 1993) p. 118.
La Dorotea (1632)

John Cheever photo
Margaret Sanger photo

“You caused this. Mother is dead from having too many children.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

To her father at her mother's funeral.
Quoted in [2010-05-09, The Pill turns 50, Nidhi Bhushan, DNA, http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report_the-pill-turns-50_1380774]

Gaio Valerio Catullo photo

“Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady's sparrow is dead, the sparrow my lady's pet, whom she loved more than her own eyes.”
Lugete, O Veneres Cupidinesque, Et quantum est hominum venustiorum. Passer mortuus est meae puellae, Passer, deliciae meae puellae.

III, lines 1–4
Lord Byron's translation:
Ye Cupids, droop each little head,
Nor let your wings with joy be spread:
My Lesbia's favourite bird is dead,
Whom dearer than her eyes she loved.
Carmina

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Elie Wiesel photo

“Waking among the dead, one wondered if one was still alive. And yet real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

A.E. Housman photo
Paul Gabriël photo

“.. that one [a tree study in Gabriël's studio] is from my early times; I don't make them that way anymore; look how the thing is painted..; and those days my teachers told me that nothing would come of me in this way. What kind of folks were they? [o. a. his early and short teacher Koekoek, c. 1844-45] And which guys belonged to them? Well, let's keep mum about that; all those guys are dead already. But those days [c. 1840's] it was the ruling idea to use nature only as a tool; she had to be embellished later with imagination and so on …. imagination …. the stupidest thing in the world. (L. de Haes asked him: Do you think imagination is so improper?) Improper, I think it is simply an unhealthy trait. You see; imagination is the proper way to insanity. Imagine that you start painting from your imagination without knowing nature; after all, there will be no result whatsoever. All those people of imagination imagine so much, and it is the greatest misfortune you can have in life, you know what it is good for: to idealize your faults.”

Paul Gabriël (1828–1903) painter (1828-1903)

translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch / citaat van Paul Gabriël, in Nederlands: ..da's er een [ een boom-studie] uit m'n eersten tijd; zoo doe 'k het niet meer; kijk dat ding eens geschilderd wezen; en in dien tijd zeiden mijn leermeesters dat er op die manier niets van mij terecht zou komen. Wat een lui waren dat hè [o.a. zijn tijdelijke vroege leermeester Koekoek, c. 1844-45]? En wie waren dat zoo al? Ja daar zullen we maar over zwijgen; die menschen zijn nu al dood; maar 't was toen de opvatting, de natuur alleen als hulpmiddel te gebruiken; zij moest nog verfraaid worden met verbeelding en zoo al meer .... imaginatie.... 't stomste wat er op de wereld is. (L. de Haes: Vindt u verbeelding dan zoo verwerpelijk?) Verwerpelijk, och ik vind het eenvoudig een ziekelijke eigenschap, zie je wel; verbeelding, dat is de weg naar de krankzinnigheid. Verbeeld je dat je uit je verbeelding gaat schilderen zonder de natuur te kennen; daar komt immers niets van terecht. Al die menschen van verbeelding verbeelden zich zoo veel, en 't is 't grootste ongeluk wat je op de wereld kan hebben, weet je waar 't alleen goed voor is: om je gebreken te idealiseeren.
Quote of Gabriël, 1893; as cited by L. de Haes, in 'P.J.C. Gabriël'; published in Elsevier's geïllustreerd maandschrift 3., April/May 1893, pp. 453-473
1880's + 1890's

Eugéne Ionesco photo
W. H. Auden photo
Jefferson Davis photo

“Julia Hayden, the colored school teacher, one of the latest victims of the White man's League, was only seventeen years of age. She was the daughter of respectable parents in Maury County, Tennessee, and had been carefully educated at the Central College, Nashville, a favorite place for the instruction of youth of both sexes of her race. She is said to have possessed unusual personal attractions as well as intelligence. Under the reign of slavery as it is defined and upheld by Davis and Toombs, Julia Hayden would probably have been taken from her parents and sent in a slave coffle to New Orleans to be sold on its auction block. But emancipation had prepared for her a different and less dreadful fate. With that strong desire for mental cultivation which marked the colored race since their freedom, in all circumstances where there is an opportunity left them for its exhibition, the young girl had so improved herself as to become capable of teaching others. She went to Western Tennessee and took charge of a school. Three days after her arrival at Hartsville, at night, two white men, armed with their guns, appeared at the house where she was staying, and demanded the school teacher. She fled, alarmed, to the room of the mistress of the house. The White Leaguers pursued. They fired their guns I through the floor of the room and the young girl fell dead within. Her murderers escaped.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

"Louisiana and the Rule of Terror" http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=EL18741010.2.9#, The Elevator (10 October 1874), Volume 10, Number 26.

Chris Hedges photo

“Vietnam is the dead albatross around Johnson's neck that may pull him down.”

Thomas A. Bailey (1902–1983) American historian

As quoted in The New York Times (November 6, 1966)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“He said it was fearful to see them stand,
Nor the living nor yet the dead,
And the light glared strange in the glassy eyes
Whose human look was fled.
For frost had done one half life's part,
And kept them from decay;
Those they loved had mouldered, but these
Look'd the dead of yesterday.”

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

The Frozen Ship, from The London Literary Gazette, (16th September 1826) - Metrical Fragment No. V. - The Frozen Ship, under the pen name 'Iole'
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Abby Sunderland photo

“But the more times she missed, the faster she’d be traveling when she finally slammed into the mast. And it wasn’t if she hit the mast; it was when. At that point, Abby would be either severely injured or dead.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 145

Ernest Barnes photo
Bill Bryson photo
Philip Sheridan photo

“The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”

Philip Sheridan (1831–1888) United States Army general

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/sheridan.htm
In response to Comanche Chief Tosawi stating "Me, Tosawi; me good Injun". Although Sheridan disputed having replied this, but biographer Roy Morris Jr. claims that popular history simply assumed that he did state it.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes photo
Phillis Wheatley photo
Mary Baker Eddy photo
Courtney Love photo

“He shakes his dead rattle
Spittle on his bib
And I don't do the dishes
I throw them in the crib”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

"Plump"
Song lyrics, Live Through This (1994)

Danny Elfman photo

“You'll never get me into a tux. Not until I'm dead and I have no choice because that's what the undertaker put me in.”

Danny Elfman (1953) American composer, record producer, and actor

From an interview in Entertainment Weekly #422, March 13, 1998.

George W. Bush photo

“I thought an interesting comment was made when somebody said to me, I heard somebody say, where's Mandela? Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.”

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

White House Press Conference http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070920-2.html (September 20, 2007)
Video http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/09/20/gwb-saddam-killed-mandelas/
2000s, 2007

Czeslaw Milosz photo

“They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Dedication" (1945), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Rescue (1945)

Bono photo

“Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"One"
Lyrics, Achtung Baby (1991)

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Hereward Carrington photo
Wilford Woodruff photo
John Varley photo
George Santayana photo
Christopher Titus photo
Gerald Durrell photo
Manuel Fraga Iribarne photo

“The best terrorist, the dead one.”

Manuel Fraga Iribarne (1922–2012) Spanish politician

Mor al llit, impunement, Manuel Fraga, icona del franquisme i responsable dels assassinats de Gasteiz, 16th January 2012, Setmanari La Directa, 16th January 2012, catalan http://www.setmanaridirecta.info/noticia/noticia-fraga,
Transition to democracy

“In every organization there is a considerable accumulation of dead wood in the executive level.”

Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) Canadian eductor

Laurence J. Peter (1969) in " Up against the Peter principle http://books.google.nl/books?id=K08EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA59". LIFE - Vol. 67, nr. 3. July 18, 1969. p. 59

Thomas Hardy photo
James Thomson (poet) photo

“There studious let me sit,
And hold high converse with the mighty dead.”

Source: The Seasons (1726-1730), Winter (1726), l. 431-432.

Margaret Atwood photo
Nas photo

“It's suicidal, high smokin' so much la', I saw a dead bird flyin through a broken sky”

Nas (1973) American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur

You're Da Man
On Albums, Stillmatic (2001)

Henry Adams photo
Friedrich Paulus photo

“You are talking to dead men here.”

Friedrich Paulus (1890–1957) German general

To a Luftwaffe officer sent to Stalingrad. Quoted in "Voices From The Third Reich: An Oral History" - Page 152 - by Johannes Steinhoff, Peter Pechel, Helmut D. Schmidt, Dennis E. Showalter - History - 1994

Neil deGrasse Tyson photo

“You don't take a dead cat to the vet. I mean you might, but why?”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

WNYC Radio Podcast, RadioLab, "Gravitational Anarchy" November 29, 2010, Minute 16:33.
2010s

Bill O'Neill photo
Benjamin Zephaniah photo

“Someone said that Capitalism will eat itself, and I think that’s like the meat industry, the meat industry itself will become dead meat and compassion will reign supreme.”

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958) English poet and author

"Zephaniah Speaks: Poetic Thoughts", interview with Arkangel Magazine (2002) reported in BenjaminZephaniah.com https://benjaminzephaniah.com/poetic-thoughts/?doing_wp_cron=1519050664.5827260017395019531250.

Slavoj Žižek photo

“Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”

161
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

M. K. Hobson photo
Eric Clapton photo

“In my lowest moments, the only reason I didn't commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn't be able to drink anymore if I was dead.”

Eric Clapton (1945) English musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist

"Clapton: The Autobiography", about his alcoholism in the 1980s

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo

“The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Letter to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (25 May 1877), as quoted in G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume II, p. 145
1870s

Paul of Tarsus photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Angelique Rockas photo
Enoch Powell photo

“Oh, sweet it is, where grass is deep
And swifts are overhead,
To lie and watch the clouds, and weep
For friends already dead.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Collected Poems (1990), p. 31

Glenn Beck photo

“But I believe in the American people. I believe that we are not too far gone. I believe that people can watch and see the difference. They can feel the difference. When you watch Barack Obama, you can just see he is angry. When you watch Mitt Romney, you can see he is not. We are not an angry nation. We don't listen to demagogues like that. It doesn’t work. No matter how much power he has amassed, no matter how many friends in the media he has, Americans know. And if they reject it this time, if they're so dead inside - that's a possibility - if they're so dead inside that they can no longer see the difference between good and evil, we have to be destroyed because we will be a remarkable evil on this planet.”

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

2012-11-05
Revenge vs. Love: This election choice is clear
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/blog/glenn/revenge-vs-love-this-election-choice-is-clear
The Glenn Beck Program
Radio, quoted in * 2012-11-06
Beck: If Americans are 'So Dead Inside' That They Re-Elect Obama, Then 'We Have to be Destroyed'
Kyle
Mantyla
RightWingWatch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/beck-if-americans-are-so-dead-inside-they-re-elected-obama-then-we-have-be-destroyed
2012-11-07
2010s, 2012

William J. Brennan photo
Emily Dickinson photo
Sienna Guillory photo

“She’s an extraordinarily talented actor who is tremendously photogenic. She’s also a dead ringer for Jill Valentine.”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

Resident Evil: Apocalypse Production Article http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/resident_evil_apocalypse_about.htm. hollywoodjesus.com. September 13, 2004
Resident Evil: Apocalypse producer Don Carmody speaks about Guillory.
About

E.M. Forster photo
Alfred Brendel photo
John Polkinghorne photo
Robert Jordan photo

“If you are not mine, then you are dead.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lanfear
(15 October 1993)

Logan Pearsall Smith photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Henry Adams photo
Thom Yorke photo

“You cannot kickstart a dead horse”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"Black Swan"
Lyrics, The Eraser (2006)

Chrétien de Troyes photo
Gene Wolfe photo
Cyril Connolly photo

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.”

Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) British author

Edward Thomas, "Early One Morning" from Poems (1917) http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/library/thomas04.html#five
Misattributed

“And then, all of a sudden, it was as though through those dark eyes an electrical circuit had been struck. She sat fascinated. Snake-and-bird fascinated. Afterwards she could not recall the details of what he had said. She remembered only that she had been absorbed, rapt, lost, for over ten minutes by the clock. She had perceived images conjured up from the dead past: a hand trailed in clear river water, deliciously cool, while the sun smiled and a shoal of tiny fishes darted between her fingers; the crisp flesh of a ripe apple straight from the tree, so juicy it ran down her chin; grass between her bare toes, the turf like springs so that she seemed not to bear the whole of her weight on her soles but to be floating, dreamlike, in slow motion, instantly transported to the moon; the western sky painted with vast heart-tearing slapdash streaks of red below the bright steel-blue of clouds, and stars coming snap-snap into view against the eastern dark; wind gentle in her hair and on her cheeks, bearing flower perfumes, dusting her with petals; snow cold to the palm as it was shaped into a ball; laughter echoing from a dark lane where only lovers walked, not thieves and muggers; butter like an ingot of soft gold; ocean spray sharp and clean as the edge of an axe; with the same sense of safe, provided rightly used; round pebbles polychrome beside a pool; rain to which a thirsty mouth could open, distilling the taste of a continent of air... And under, and through, and in, and around all this, a conviction: “Something can be done to get that back!”
She was crying. Small tears like ants had itched their paths down her cheeks. She said, when she realized he had fallen silent, “But I never knew that! None of it! I was born and raised right here in New York!””

”But don’t you think you should have known it?” Austin Train inquired gently.
September “MINE ENEMIES ARE DELIVERED INTO MY HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Davey Havok photo
Muhammad bin Qasim photo
Matthew Arnold photo

“Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Diary entry for the day he died (15 April 1888); from Ecclesiasticus, xxxviii
Matthew Arnold's Notebooks (1902)

Benito Mussolini photo

“The root of our psychological weakness was this: We socialists have never examined the problems of nations. The International was never concerned with it. The International is dead, paralyzed by events. Ten million proletarians are today on the battlefield.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

As quoted in The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, J.L. Talmon, University of California Press (1981) p. 492. Original source: Mussolini, Opera Omnia VI, p. 427, 1914
1910s

Learned Hand photo
Suzanne Collins photo

“So, now that we’re dead, what’s our next move?”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Gale (p. 289)
The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Diogenes Laërtius photo

“On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated: "As much," said he, "as the living are to the dead."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Aristotle, 9.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 5: The Peripatetics

John Green photo
Finley Peter Dunne photo