Quotes about the dead (3313 quotes, page 33)

“Like the roaches and the rats, ants had learned to live with their human neighbors without much trouble. When the concrete of human cities spread across the globe and half the animals on Earth were on endangered lists, no one had worried about the ants. They were doing fine, thanks, and spilled fast food was just as plentiful and delicious as dead forest animals had once been.
Adapt or die.”

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

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 4 (p. 42)

Animals , Learning , Food

“How capitalism finds its substance and its essence in the living work, in such a way that it comes exclusively from it, can't go without it, lives only drawing at each time its life from that of the worker, life that then becomes his own, this is what expresses in the whole work of Marx the theme of vampire. "Capitalism is dead work which, such as a vampire, animates itself only in sucking the living work and the more it pumps, the more its life is cheerful."”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Marx II. une philosophie de l’économie, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 435
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Comment le capital trouve sa substance et son essence dans le travail vivant, de telle manière qu’il provient exclusivement de lui, ne peut se passer de lui, ne vit que pour autant qu’il puise à chaque instant sa vie dans celle du travailleur, vie qui devient ainsi la sienne, c’est ce qu’exprime à travers toute l’œuvre de Marx le thème du vampire. « Le capital est du travail mort qui, semblable au vampire, ne s’anime qu’en suçant le travail vivant et sa vie est d’autant plus allègre qu’il en pompe davantage ».

Drawing , Time , Animals , Way

“All the people sick and dead on the ships, and the ones sick and dead on this soil. What are gods for, then, if they let things like this to happen to their people?”

Nalo Hopkinson book The Salt Roads

Source: The Salt Roads (2003), p. 66

Relation ships , God , People

“You could kill me right now and I will be permanently dead, and I would willing do that if would end world hunger and poverty. That's a sacrifice! Saying I'm gonna let some people beat me and torture me and kill me, and a day and a half I'm gonna rise up and become what I was before, (...) That's not a sacrifice, that's a bad weekend!”

Matt Dillahunty (1969) American activist

Episode 24.04 (January 26, 2020) from The Atheist Experience (Link is unavailable on YouTube)
The Atheist Experience

Hunger , Bad luck , People , World

“Now it is all over. The French nation is dead.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Napoleon the Little (1852), Conclusion, Part Second, I
Napoleon the Little (1852)

““… I said about limiting factors. Well, there’s one that you can’t beat. Put steel under fifty thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet’s surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.” <…>”

Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) American writer, journalist

Из малой прозы

“Our ability to block our experience is an evolutionary dead end. Rather than experiencing and transforming pain, conflict, and fear, we often divert or dampen them with a kind of unwitting hypnosis. Over a lifetime, more and more stress accumulates. There is no release, and our consciousness narrows. The floodlight shrinks into the slender beam of a flashlight. We lose the vividness of colors, sensitivity to sounds, peripheral vision, sensitivity to others, emotional intensity. The spectrum of awareness becomes ever narrower.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Three, Brains Changing, Minds Changing

Fear , Pain , Color

“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.”

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) American journalist

"To the Public", No. 1 (1 January 1831) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2928t.html, quoted in [Todras, Ellen H., Angelina Grimké: Voice of Abolition, https://books.google.com/books?id=-S8ZAQAAMAAJ, 1999, Linnet, 978-0-208-02485-5, 46]
The Liberator (1831 - 1866)

Housing , Justice , People , Truth

“I will say, finally, that I despair of the republic while slavery exists therein. If I look up to God for success, no smile of mercy or forgiveness dispels the gloom of futurity; if to our own resources, they are daily diminishing; if to all history, our destruction is not only possible, but almost certain. Why should we slumber at this momentous crisis? If our hearts were dead to every throb of humanity; if it were lawful to oppress, where power is ample; still, if we had any regard for our safety and happiness, we should strive to crush the Vampire which is feeding upon our life-blood. All the selfishness of our nature cries aloud for a better security. Our own vices are too strong for us, and keep us in perpetual alarm; how, in addition to these, shall we be able to contend successfully with millions of armed and desperate men, as we must eventually, if slavery do not cease?”

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) American journalist

Address to the Colonization Society http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=562 (4 July 1829)

Despair , Selfishness , God , Forgiveness

“I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t hear a thing, not them talking or the wind or the truck driving off or bees. Couldn’t scream out to Will to help me or to anyone else, all of them talking and going on as though I wasn’t even there.
And that was when I realized: This is what it’s like to be dead. No clouds or lights or bright tunnel, not even darkness: just the world turning and going on without you and you’ll never be part of it again.”

Elizabeth Hand book Wylding Hall

Source: Wylding Hall (2015), Chapter 5

Light , Help , World , Bee

“This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
[...]
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
[http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#fiftysevensixty In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
]Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
[http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#sixtyonesixtytwo Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear]
[http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#sixtyfoursixtythree As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose]
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.”

T.S. Eliot book The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men (1925)

Star , Hope , Death , Men

“The dead are never silent.”

Robert Jordan The Path of Daggers

Lews Therin
The Path of Daggers (20 October 1998)

“I kind of feel like Old Darko died. Like, when I think about myself, or myself when I was playing, I feel like I’m sort of thinking about someone who is dead.”

Darko Miličić (1985) Serbian basketball player

As quoted in "Finding Darko" http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/20211833/nba-bust-darko-milicic-finds-success-back-home-serbia (8 February 2017), by Sam Borden, ESPN
2010s

Thinking , Feeling

“We must no longer have a pacific conception of peace. In the Middle Ages it was otherwise. The existence of the individual had no exaggerated importance. Pacifist literature depicts death on the field of battle as an unnatural death because it does not understand the ancient Germanic horror of death on a bed, and arteriosclerosis appears to it more virile than a bullet. Pacifists dwell on the horrors of the war dead as if a peace corpse were more aesthetic. The representatives of the national revolution are men and soldiers who are physically and morally warriors.”

Franz von Papen (1879–1969) German chancellor

Speech to the Stalhelm in Münster (13 May 1933), quoted in Frederick Schuman, Hitler and the Nazi Dictatorship (London: Hale, 1936), pp. 345-346
1930s

Peace , Understanding , War , Literature

“After signing it, he added the postscript: By the time you read this, you will already be dead.”

Roger Zelazny book Roadmarks

Source: Roadmarks (1979), Chapter 27 (p. 162)

Reading , Time

“The second I saw those bastards coming down the street, I knew it was over for me. I’m dead. It’s just a matter of time is all.”

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

“That’s always true,” Lydia said, her mind taken with other matters. “For everyone.”
The Churn (2014)

Time

“Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead. The shaping power of language cannot be avoided. We cannot choose to distance ourselves from it. We can only choose to employ it in one way rather than another.”

Stanley Fish (1938) American academic

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 42

Way

“The old customs are dead, and we keep trying on new ones, like badly fitting clothes.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986), Chapter 3 (p. 50)

Clothes

“Meaning in life can’t be reduced to simplistic mottos. In some number of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger, but I won’t be around to savor it.”

Sean Carroll (1966) American theoretical cosmologist

Chap. 1 : The Fundamental Nature of Reality
The Big Picture (2016)

Life , Time , Memory

“Seriously. The wheel’s spinning but the hamster’s dead.”

Nick Harkaway (1972) British writer

Twitter, 2019-01-26, on a Brexit development https://twitter.com/Harkaway/status/1089230075365638146
Twitter

“The strongest of all the obstacles to progress, the reign of the dead.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Private notes, quoted in G. E. Fasnacht, Acton's Political Philosophy. An Analysis (1952), p. 60, n. 1
Undated

“You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.
You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.
You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother's hair?
I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother.”

Smohalla (1815–1895) Native American prophet-dreamer

As quoted in The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (1890) by James Mooney on page 721; it has been sometimes also ascribed to w:Wovoka, which seems misappropriated as Mooney himself mentions Wovoka in the same book from page 765 on.
"It is perhaps the most commonly cited piece of evidence documenting the Native American belief in Mother Earth. […]They rarely place the statement in the context in which Mooney presented it, that is, the history of millenarian movements spawned in part by the pressures Native American felt from the European-Americans' insatiable desire for land […] it is a direct response to 'white' pressures placed on native relationships with the land." From Mother Earth. An American Story. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5975950.html

Home , Waiting , Grass , People

“I mean, with all this talk of building walls, and stuff like that, I think it’s worth remembering that if you look at the servicemen and the military in this country, a lot of them have names like Ramirez and Hernandez and Rodriguez. And just from my reading, it’s interesting that many of these men fight and die for their country – and women – and some of them don’t even get their citizenship until after they’re dead. So I think talk of walls and so forth is nonsensical.”

Mel Gibson (1956) American actor, film director, producer and screenwriter

Interview with Jorge Ramos on 2016 U.S. Presidential election https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b20BuX_Y-k/

Reading , Country , Thinking , Fight

“We are dead men. Dead men should be quiet in their graves, but they never are.”

Robert Jordan Winter's Heart

Lews Therin Telamon
Winter's Heart (9 November 2000)

Men

“Stand up from among the dead, and patiently work as one waiting for the judgment-seat of Christ.”

William Paton Mackay (1839–1885) Scottish clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 125.

Christ , Waiting

“Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
And say out prayers that most need saying
For needful sinners who've forgotten praying;
And in every alcove and niche you spy
The living dead who envy the long since gone
Who never wished to die.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

Envy

“A dead man does not bite.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Pompeius, sec. 76
Parallel Lives

“Stopped in schooling and stopped in learning is different. If you stop learning that means you're dead, because everyday in our life we have to learn something new.”

Christian Canlubo (2002) Filipino Internet Entrepreneur

Source: https://twitter.com/canlubochris/status/1239546180633124864 | Christian Canlubo personal Twitter account

School , Life , Learning

“You can't drive a flock of sheep to market in a dead straight line, but there are ways of getting 'em there.”

John Wyndham book The Day of the Triffids

The Day of the Triffids (1951), ch 10 - p.179

Way

“We aren't alive or dead,
we aren't natural or ethereal,
we haven't body or soul,
we do not exist in this world or in another,
we have no beginning or end,
our place is placeless,
our time is timeless.
The heart has a mirror
to infinity turned.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: The book AN OCEAN OF SOULS: Beyond the heaven

Soul , Time , Heart , Nature

“The best advice about getting older? Just be thankful you’re not dead!”

Chadwick Boseman (1976–2020) American actor

Source: GQ Roundtable (2014)
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Chadwick Boseman / Quotes / GQ Roundtable (2014)

“Asia gave us dowry deaths and the caste system. Africa elevated famine to an art form. North America cultivated chattel slavery for far longer than I would have dared hope; South America has done things with political oppression that I am obliged to call brilliant; Australia showed the world that the only good aborigine is a dead aborigine; and Antarctica has fabulous weather. Of all the continents that constitute Earth’s terrain, however, Europe remains dearest to my heart and closest to my soul.
I allude here not to the sweatshops, the world wars, or totalitarian socialism (though none of these innovations has escaped my notice) but to the fact that the European imagination endowed me with a degree of glamour—you might even say charm—that in pre-coma times enabled me to function with extraordinary effectiveness. The concept of an Evil One is intrinsic to Islam, of course; the ancient Hebrews had their “adversary,” their satan; the Egyptians feared a dark deity called Set; Zoroastrians believed in Ahriman, essence of destruction (forever warring with Ohrmazd, source of all things bright and beautiful). But only in Christian Europe did the Prince of Hell acquire a personality as vivid and endearing as any you will meet in a Dickens novel.”

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

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 11 (p. 253; spoken by the Devil)

Soul , Hell , Imagination , Time

“The bugle echoes shrill and sweet,
But not of war it sings to-day.
The road is rhythmic with the feet
⁠Of men-at-arms who come to pray. The roses blossom white and red
⁠On tombs where weary soldiers lie;
Flags wave above the honored dead
⁠And martial music cleaves the sky. Above their wreath-strewn graves we kneel,
⁠They kept the faith and fought the fight.
Through flying lead and crimson steel
⁠They plunged for Freedom and the Righteousness. May we, their grateful children, learn
⁠Their strength, who lie beneath this sod,
Who went through fire and death to earn
⁠At last the accolade of God.In shining rank on rank arrayed
They march, the legions of the Lord;
He is their Captain unafraid,
The Prince of Peace . . . Who brought a sword.”

Joyce Kilmer Trees and Other Poems

"Memorial Day"; this poem was later published in The Army and Navy Hymnal (1920)
Trees and Other Poems (1914)

Singing , Peace , Faith , Freedom

“Now Im dead, now Im dead, and you're all
Going on to meet your reward. Are you scared? Are you scared? Are you scared? Are you scared?
You might have never heard, but God's comic.”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

God's Comic
Song lyrics, Spike (1989)

God

“Appreciate the magnificent brain you possess. Protect and nurture it. Strive to be a good skeptic and critical thinker so that fewer hours of your precious life will be squandered on dead-end beliefs. Always try to think like a scientist so that you might better know truth from fiction.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

Truth , Thinking , Life

“The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A being that is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

Variant translation: Now slavery has a certain likeness to death, hence it is also called civil death. For life is most evident in a thing's moving itself, while what can only be moved by another, seems to be as if dead. But it is manifest that a slave is not moved by himself, but only at his master's command.
Chapter 14 https://www.pathsoflove.com/aquinas/perfection-of-the-spiritual-life.html#chapter14
On The Perfection of the Spiritual Life https://www.pathsoflove.com/aquinas/perfection-of-the-spiritual-life.html (1269-1270)
Original: (la) Vita enim in hoc maxime manifestatur quod aliquid movet se ipsum; quod autem non potest moveri nisi ab alio, quasi mortuum esse videtur.

Life

“Think of tonight as having a real purpose. Yes, it is dining with the dead in order to be at one with our ancestors, but at the same time, a good scoff in shared company provides solace for the unhappy, it anneals the internal stress of bereavement, it helps the living along the path of their recovery from grief.”

Lindsey Davis (1949) English novelist

“That’s a useful motto for a caterer!”
Invitation to Die

Thinking , Time , Help

“I [also] know that, on my deathbed, I shall still be believing with one part of my brain that somewhere on every ocean of the world there is a grey, grey ship with three funnels and sixteen-inch guns which can blow out of the water any other navy which is likely to face it. I know it is not so. Indeed, I realised at a relatively early age that it is not so. But that factor – that emotional factor... will not die until I, the carrier of it, am dead.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Institute of Contemporary British History at the London School of Economics (July 1991), quoted in Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell (1997), p. 9
1990s

Water , Relation ships , Age , World

“I'm waiting. … For something new and strange,
Something I've dreamt about in some deep sleep,
Truer than any waking,
Heard about, long ago, so long ago,
In sunshine and the summer grass of childhood,
When the sky seems so near.
I do not know its shape, its will, its purpose
And yet all day its will has been upon me,
More real than any voice I ever heard,
More real than yours or mine or our dead child's,
More real than all the voices there upstairs,
Brawling above their cups, more real than light.
And there is light in it and fire and peace,
Newness of heart and strangeness like a sword,
And all my body trembles under it,
And yet I do not know.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Innkeeper's wife
Source: A Child is Born (1942)

Childhood , Sleep , Peace , Waiting

“It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.
Nevertheless, we make a beginning. it is not for the metal alone we go to the Dead Places now — there are the books and the writings. They are hard to learn. And the magic tools are broken — but we can look at them and wonder. At least, we make a beginning. And, when I am chief priest we shall go beyond the great river. We shall go to the Place of the Gods — the place newyork — not one man but a company. We shall look for the images of the gods and find the god ASHING and the others — the gods Lincoln and Biltmore and Moses. But they were men who built the city, not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man's face. They were men who were here before us. We must build again.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God , Learning , Knowledge , Truth

“Now I tell what is very strong magic. I woke in the midst of the night. When I woke, the fire had gone out and I was cold. It seemed to me that all around me there were whisperings and voices. I closed my eyes to shut them out. Some will say that I slept again, but I do not think that I slept. I could feel the spirits drawing my spirit out of my body as a fish is drawn on a line.
Why should I lie about it? I am a priest and the son of a priest. If there are spirits, as they say, in the small Dead Places near us, what spirits must there not be in that great Place of the Gods? And would not they wish to speak? After such long years? I know that I felt myself drawn as a fish is drawn on a line. I had stepped out of my body — I could see my body asleep in front of the cold fire, but it was not I. I was drawn to look out upon the city of the gods.
It should have been dark, for it was night, but it was not dark. Everywhere there were lights — lines of light — circles and blurs of light — ten thousand torches would not have been the same. The sky itself was alight — you could barely see the stars for the glow in the sky. I thought to myself "This is strong magic" and trembled. There was a roaring in my ears like the rushing of rivers. Then my eyes grew used to the light and my ears to the sound. I knew that I was seeing the city as it had been when the gods were alive.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God , Drawing , Night , Light

“My people are the Hill People. They are the men.
I go into the Dead Places but I am not slain.
I take the metal from the Dead Places but I am not blasted.
I travel upon the god-roads and am not afraid.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God , People , Travel , Men

“So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their shoulders. With so much of immediate and indisputable importance on their hands, why should they attend to what was forecast for the end of the century, when most of them would be not only out of office but dead and gone? … It was not for them to heed the cries of anguish from those of their own people who already saw their towns being changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation. For these the much vaunted compassion of the parties and politicians was not available: the parties and the politicians preferred to be busy making speeches on race relations; and if any of their number dared to tell them the truth, even less than the whole truth, about what was happening and what would happen here in England, they denounced them as racialist and turned them out of doors. They could feel safe; for they said in their hearts: 'If trouble comes, it will not be in our time; let the next generation see to it!'”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

… The explosive which will blow us asunder is there and the fuse is burning, but the fuse is shorter than had been supposed. The transformation which I referred to earlier as being without even a remote parallel in our history, the occupation of the hearts of this metropolis and of towns and cities across England by a coloured population amounting to millions, this before long will be past denying. It is possible that the people of this country will, with good or ill grace, accept what they did not ask for, did not want and were not told of. My own judgment—it is a judgment which the politician has a duty to form to the best of his ability—I have not feared to give: it is—to use words I used two years and a half ago—that 'the people of England will not endure it'.
Source: Speech to the Carshalton and Banstead Young Conservatives at Carshalton Hall (15 February 1971), from Still to Decide (1972), pp. 202-203

Time , Business , People , Heart

“Orthodox Buddhism strictly forbids religious rites, and the learned lamas acknowledge that they cannot bestow spiritual enlightenment, which can only be acquired by personal intellectual effort. Yet the majority believe in the efficacy of certain ritualistic methods of the healing of the sick, securing material prosperity, the conquest of evil beings and the guidance of the spirits of the dead in the other world.”

Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) French explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist and writer

Magic And Mystery In Tibet

Personality , Learning , World , Evil

“Our fathers, in New England, in the Middle Colonies, and in the South, brought African slaves to America for reasons of their own, which it is impossible to justify, and useless now to censure. The God of our fathers has set them free by overruling a vast amount of human selfishness and passion in long-continued political and military conflict. Let the dead past bury its dead. Forgetting the things which are behind, let us reach forth to those things which are before.”

John Albert Broadus (1827–1895) American pastor and theologian

"As to the Colored People" (1 February 1883), as quoted in Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary https://sbts-wordpress-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/sbts/uploads/2018/12/Racism-and-the-Legacy-of-Slavery-Report-v4.pdf#page=6 (December 2018), by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, pp. 38–39

Selfishness , God , Past , Forgetting

“O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)

Night , Search , Star , Self-confidence

“The only good artist is a dead artist.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Death and the Eternal Forever (2014)

“Even if you live to one hundred, you’ll still be dead forever.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Death and the Eternal Forever (2014)

“You may know you’re going to die, but you won’t know you’re dead.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“Everyone is dead in heaven.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Death and the Eternal Forever (2014)

“And I
in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of
their depths.”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)

Pain , Tear

“Wake me up for breakfast, if I'm not dead.”

Tom Stoppard The Coast of Utopia

Turgenev
The Coast of Utopia: Salvage (2002)

“We've all grown up with the idea that gunning a man down is just fun and games. All of us, as kids, played cops and robbers, with toy pistols or pointing a finger at somebody and saying, "Bang, Bang. You're dead!"”

Sam Peckinpah (1925–1984) American film director and screenwriter

Both the movies and television have perpetuated the idea that shooting a man is clean and quick and simple, and when he falls down there is only a small hole, or a blood-stain, to show how he died. Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games maybe we'll get somewhere about violence on the screen in the first place. [...] No, I don't like violence. In fact, when I look at the film myself, I find it unbearable. I don't think I'll be able to see it again for five years.
Responding, circa July 1969, to the question, "Why did you make this film?", posed by a film critic for Reader's Digest; as quoted in "Looking Sideways: Photographic Violence Won't Stop Violence" https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=78219633 by Whitney Bolton, Fort-Myers News-Press (July 23, 1969), p. 4

Idea , Game

“Let us learn from the lips of death the lessons of life. Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this. For they are not wholly separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. In spirit they are with us. And we may think of them as silent, invisible, but real presences in our households.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Life and Destiny (1913)

Thinking , Memory , Life , Death

“Our loss, indeed, will always remain loss, and no preaching or teaching can ever make it otherwise. But the question is whether it shall weaken and embitter, or strengthen and purify us, and lead us to raise to the dead we mourn a monument in our lives that shall be better than any pillared chapel or storied marble tomb.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 8 : Suffering and Consolation
Life and Destiny (1913)

Loss , Making love , Question

“So he wasn’t dead. That was probably supposed to be a good thing.”

Brent Weeks book The Way of Shadows

Source: The Way of Shadows (2008), Chapter 22 (p. 171)

“You aren’t making art, you’re making corpses. Dead is dead.”

Brent Weeks book The Way of Shadows

Source: The Way of Shadows (2008), Chapter 12 (p. 92)

Making love , Art

“If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead,” Ty said.
“Why?”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

Einstein asked.
“Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs.”
“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 776)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“If it is right that the State should resume its authority over the land for the purposes of burying the dead, it is surely also right that it should exercise its ownership where it is necessary it should do so to feed the living.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Killerton Park, near Exeter, opening the Liberal land campaign (17 September 1925), quoted in The Times (18 September 1925), p. 14
Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons

Exercises

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?"”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man" and other guys start to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened.
The Things They Carried (1990), How to Tell a True War Story

Truth , Lie , Guy

“Listen, days decay, like food, like fish, like dead bodies. This night will decay, too and you will forget. Listen, we will forget.”

Chigozie Obioma (1986) Nigerian writer

The fishermen (2015)

Night , Food , Forgetting , Fish

“And yet in no time they disappear, / perhaps to reappear in a dream… / But now they are dead, / deleted without having lived / because each man exists just for himself / and when he dies (did he live?) nobody knows / that once he breathed.”

Menotti Lerro (1980) Italian poet

Source: The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 49

Time , Dreams

“If life is a mixture of drained rivers / which carry to the sea echoes of water, / we are nothing but shadows – / reflected lights of dead bodies without no possible outlet or shore.”

Menotti Lerro (1980) Italian poet

From The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 37

Light , Water , Sea , Life

“For humans, dead or alive, change cannot be avoided.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Change

“We are all experts and sometimes encounter limits in our fields, including those we call fools. Even the doctor can only heal the sick, but not raise the dead.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Fools

“What is the use of having a new generation without inspiration? It's such a shame that we learn more from the dead than from the living.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Learning

“When steak lovers advise you to reincarnate as an animal. You know you are dead before you even begin to live. Reincarnation is a universal joke.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Universe , Animals , Lovers

“Christ is dead and his teachings moribund.”

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 Twentieth Century Journey: The Start 1904-1930, William L. Shirer, Little, Brown & Company, (1976) p. 402 (proclaimed in 1922)
1920s

Christ

“Look up! the proof is round you written large;
Your Faith is in the balance wanting found;
Your shipless seas confess it; bridgeless streams;
Your wasted wealth of ore, and moor, and bay.
Beneath the Upas shade of Faith depraved
All things lie dead -- wealth, comfort, freedom, power.”

Aubrey Thomas de Vere (1814–1902) Irish poet and critic

"The Sisters; or, Weal in Woe: An Irish Tale" in The Sisters, Inisfail, and Other Poems (1861), pp. 3-42.

Freedom , Lie , Sea , Faith

“And captains that we thought were dead,
And dreamers that we thought were dumb,
And voices that we thought were fled,
Arise, and call us, and we come;
And "search in thine own soul," they cry;
"For there, too, lurks thine enemy."”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Search for the foe in thine own soul,
The sloth, the intellectual pride;
The trivial jest that veils the goal
For which our fathers lived and died;
The lawless dreams, the cynic Art,
That rend thy nobler self apart.
The Search-Lights
The Lord of Misrule and Other Poems (1915)

Soul , Search , Cry

“A warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he's clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.”

Carlos Castaneda book The Wheel of Time

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from "Tales of Power" (Chapter 10)

“I was once dead but I live again, I think independence is epic fortnite win.”

Olof Palme (1927–1986) Swedish 20th century prime minister

Thinking

“May the Lord bless you. May He carry you through the pandemic, give salvation to the dead, health to the sick, work for everyone. I also pray for priests who are victims of pressure.”

John Lee Juo-Wang (1966) bishop of the roman-catholic church

Source: Why a bishop in Taiwan resigned only six months after installation https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/248115/why-a-bishop-in-taiwan-resigned-only-six-months-after-installation (June 23, 2021)

Health

“I see blood in here every day, every day someone's getting shot, someone's getting cut, someone's getting beat ... i've lived in that all my life woman, that don't wrinkle up my forehead ... you can pile 100 dead bodies up in front of my cell and it don't set me to do nothing ...”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Source: Diane Sawyer interview (ABC, 1993)

Life

“If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ancient Work
Source: The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XII - The Enfant Terrible of Literature

Understanding , Personality , Thinking

“It's hard to be desperate, when you are dead.”

Rachel Scott (1981–1999) American murder victim

Source: "Desperate Measures" (25 April 1998), as quoted in Rachel's Tears: 10th Anniversary Edition: The Spiritual Journey of Columbine https://books.google.com/books?id=GE5sCrZ9JwkC&pg=PA109 (2008), by Beth Nimmo, Darrell Scott, and Steve Rabey, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, p. 127

“Privacy is dead, and it was killed by the internet. This is what our generation will be remembered for.”

Mikko Hyppönen (1969) Finnish computer security expert

Source: Mikko Hyppönen interview by Heikki Valkama (in Finnish) https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10565677 Yle, December 2018

“What can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? “Justice” should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being.”

Lev Shestov (1866–1938) Russian theologian

Source: In Job's Balances: on the sources of the eternal truths, The Conquest of the Self-Evident; Dostoievsky’s Philosophy p. 3

Justice , Knowledge

“All our great spiritual leaders are dead. Moses is dead, Muhammad is dead, Buddha is dead, the Reverend Jim Jones is dead, and I'm not feeling so hot myself!”

Brother Theodore (1906–2001) German-American monologuist and comedian

Feeling

“There's two empty seats right middle - this is supposed to be sold out, where are they? I hope they're dead in a fucking car crash!”

Frankie Boyle (1972) Scottish comedian

Stand-up, The Last Days of Sodom (2012)

Hope , Cars

“It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot, I will not do that. I won’t do it, and they better not touch my kids either.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

2021

“Leave him alone. He has already met his judge. I wage war on the living, not the dead.”

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500–1558) Holy Roman Emperor

In response to the Duke of Alva who proposed to desecrate the tomb of Martin Luther, burn his body, and scatter his ashes to the wind.
Source: Luther and His Times Michael Grzonka

War

“I’d rather be a live pessimist than a dead comedian.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

Source: Short fiction, Future Tense (1964), Sail 25 (p. 93)

“Economists are surgeons ... who operate beautifully on the dead and torment the living.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Maxims, #458
Original: (fr) Les économistes sont des chirurgiens qui … opérant à merveille sur le mort et martyrisant le vif.
Original: (fr) Maximes et Pensées, #458

“Remember, all good proceeds from accord. A leaderless people are dead.”

Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad (1889–1965) Caliph of the Messiah

Quote

People

“People get the wrong idea about me, they think I'm depressed or something - I'm not depressed. I don't wish that I was dead, I wish... that you were all dead.”

Frankie Boyle (1972) Scottish comedian

Stand-up, Excited for You to See and Hate This (2020)

People , Thinking , Idea

“Despite common belief, the goblin language did include a word for trust. It was derived from the word for trustworthy, which in the goblin tongue, was the same as the word for dead.”

Jim C. Hines (1974) American writer

Source: The Goblin Quest Series, Goblin Hero (2007), Chapter 1 (pp. 19-20)

“You're hearing evidence of dead people voting and you're hearing people who don't live in the states and you think wow this is gonna be turned down, it's gonna be flipped to the rightful winner, and it never happened.”

Mike Lindell (1961) American businessman

Source: 3 April 2021 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWE0qiU9EEI&t=2m51s with Doug Billings

People , Thinking

“"It's not exactly to my best
But it may pass the final test;
And should it break, no man can know
It was my hand that made it so.
The thing is faulty, but perhaps
We'll never hear it when it snaps."
Of course the workman couldn't see
The mangled car beneath the tree,
The dead man, and the tortured wife
Doomed to a cripple's chair for life –
His chief concern was getting by
The stern inspector's eager eye.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

The Broken Wheel, fourth and fifth stanzas.
The Passing Throng (1923)

Tree , Cars , Life

“If through the years we're not to do
Much finer deeds than we have done;
If we must merely wander through
Time's garden, idling in the sun;
If there is nothing big ahead,
Why do we fear to join the dead?Unless to-morrow means that we
Shall do some needed service here;
That tasks are waiting you and me
That will be lost, save we appear;
Then why this dreadful thought of sorrow
That we may never see to-morrow?”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: Just Folks (1917), Living, first and second stanzas.

Appearance , Fear , Time , Waiting

“Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

https://twitter.com/wise_chimp/status/1488946174321205253?s=21

Tree

“Half dead’s a lot worse than dead, when you know you’re gonna die in another three, six days no matter what anyone else does.”

Samuel R. Delany book They Fly at Çiron

Source: They Fly at Çiron (1993), Chapter 6 (p. 166)

“I don't rap for dead presidents, I'd rather see the president dead”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"We As Americans" (2004)
2000s

“When hope lies dead—ah, when 'tis death to live,
And wrongs remembered make the heart still bleed,
Better are Sleep's kind lies for Life's blind need
Than truth, if lies a little peace can give.”

Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832–1914) English literary critic and poet

"Prophetic Pictures at Venice II: The Temptation", p. 199.
The Coming of Love and Other Poems (1897)

Sleep , Truth , Peace , Hope

“All the mysteries of the world seem normal after dark. If imagination shows dead thumbs aching for a ride, those dead folk only prove the hot and spermy goodness of life.”

Jack Cady book The Night We Buried Road Dog

Source: The Night We Buried Road Dog (1993), p. 469

Imagination , World , Life

“Only the dead find peace, only the living desire it.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)

Peace

“The fool hath said … The fool hath said
And we, who deemed him wise,
We, who believed that Thou wast dead,
How should we seek Thine eyes?How should we seek to Thee for power,
Who scorned Thee yesterday?
How should we kneel in this dread hour?
Lord, teach us how to pray.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Dedication, later published as "A Prayer in Time of War"
A Belgian Christmas Eve (1915)

Fools

“Perhaps indeed Jehovah is not dead,
But mere retir’d, withdrawn or otherwise
Contracted hath, as Zohar subtle saith,
His Essence Infinite; and, Epicurean, waits
The outcome vast with vast indifference.”

James Blish book The Day After Judgment

Source: The Day After Judgment (1971), Chapter 13 (p. 161)

Waiting , Indifference

“On behalf of all those dead
who learned their hatred of women long ago,
for those who hate them now, for those unborn
who shall live to hate them yet, I now declare
my firm conviction: neither earth nor ocean
produces a creature as savage and monstrous
as woman.”

Euripidés book Hecuba

Hecuba (424 BC), lines 1177-1182. [Euripides, William Arrowsmith (translated by), Grene, David, Lattimore, Richmond, Euripides III: Four Tragedies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, USA, 0226307824, paperback]
Variant ( tr. Jay Kardan and Laura-Gray Street (2010) http://didaskalia.net/issues/8/32/):
Let me tell you, if anyone in the past has spoken
ill of women, or speaks so now or will speak so
in the future, I’ll sum it up for him: Neither sea
nor land has ever produced a more monstrous
creature than woman.

Hate , Learning , Women

“People living and dead, things past and present, all are contributories to that diminutive stream, oneself; a reflection which is essentially consoling, since it associates one with the sum of things and prevents one from living in barren isolation.”

Alfred Austin (1835–1913) British writer and poet

Source: The Garden That I Love: Second Series (1907), p. 4.

People , Past

Quotes about the dead page 33

Quotes about the dead
page 33