„people can die of mere imagination“

„Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere.“

—  Charles Sanders Peirce American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist 1839 - 1914

Vol. VI, par. 286
Collected Papers (1931-1958)

„It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?“

—  Arthur Conan Doyle, book The Valley of Fear

Source: The Valley of Fear

„Imagination is merely the exploitation of our memory.“

—  Pierre Bonnard French painter and printmaker 1867 - 1947

„Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.“

—  Alan Turing British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist 1912 - 1954

Variant: Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

„You've no idea how long life goes on and how many, many changes it brings. Young people seem to imagine that it's over in a flash, that they do this thing, or that thing, and then die, but I can assure you they are quite wrong.“

—  Nancy Mitford British writer 1904 - 1973

Source: Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels

„Translation: The Revolution is so that people can live, not so that they can die!“

—  Lu Xun Chinese novelist and essayist 1881 - 1936

Original: (zh-CN) 革命是要人生，不是要人死！
Source: [citation needed]

„"People die from typewriters falling on their heads." (talking about taking chances because you can die at any moment.)“

—  Jonathan Davis Heavy metal singer, frontman for Korn 1971

„You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.“

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

From An Insight, An Idea with Tim Berners-Lee http://www.weforum.org/sessions/summary/insight-idea-tim-berners-lee at 27:27 (25 January 2013)
Context: When somebody has learned how to program a computer … You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.

„Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.“

—  Alfred Austin British writer and poet 1835 - 1913

Prose Papers on Poetry Macmillan & Co 1910.
Prose Papers on Poetry (1910)

„Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can;
No need for greed or hunger –
A brotherhood of man;
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…“

—  John Lennon English singer and songwriter 1940 - 1980

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one;
I hope some day you will join us,
And the world will live as one.
"Imagine" (song)
Lyrics, Imagine (1971 album)

„That's why the peoples have to die -- so that the Jew can live. He drives the peoples to war to make a profit from the fratricide of the white race.
In the World War 11 million gentiles had to die. The Jew was the winner.“

—  Julius Streicher German politician 1885 - 1946

Deswegen müssen die Völker sterben, damit der Jude leben kann. Er hetzt die Völker zum Krieg, um aus dem Brudermord der weißen Rasse Gewinn zu ziehen.
Im Weltkrieg mussten 11 Millionen Nichtjuden sterben. Der Jude aber war der Sieger.
05/20/1932, speech in the Hercules Hall in Nuremberg ("Kampf dem Weltfeind", Stürmer publishing house, Nuremberg, 1938)

„I frankly can't wait, because the idea of Bill Clinton back in the White House with nothing to do is something I just can't imagine, I can't imagine the American people can imagine….“

—  Mitt Romney American businessman and politician 1947

In response to the question, "How would you run against Hillary and Bill Clinton in November?", MSNBC, Republican Presidential Candidate Debate, FL, 2007-01-25
2007 campaign for Republican nomination for United States President

„It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.“

—  Jonathan Safran Foer, book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

„But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.“

—  Northrop Frye Canadian literary critic and literary theorist 1912 - 1991

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Context: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.

„I say the entities that are named as gods by Earthians are imagined into being by Earthians as personal helper-buddies, justifiers, threateners (my god can beat up your god). They don't "run on" anything any more than a mirror image "runs on" anything. They merely reflect what people want them to be.“

—  Sheri S. Tepper American fiction writer 1929 - 2016

Strange Horizons interview (2008)
Context: I say the entities that are named as gods by Earthians are imagined into being by Earthians as personal helper-buddies, justifiers, threateners (my god can beat up your god). They don't "run on" anything any more than a mirror image "runs on" anything. They merely reflect what people want them to be. "I want to have more children than my brother does, thus proving I'm a better man than he is, so my god tells me I should have a big family." "I want to screw women, so my god is going to give me seventy virgins I can screw for all eternity." The "gods" in The Margarets who could really do anything were actually an old, highly evolved race of real people. The others were only reflections. The real God, who may really exist, is outside all that, perhaps watching closely, perhaps merely asleep for a few trillion years while the experiment runs out.
We — thee and me as individuals — will never know that God, though after a few trillion years, the universe as a whole may come to understand that God.

„War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people.“

—  Jawaharlal Nehru, book The Discovery of India

The Discovery of India (1946)
Context: The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth.

„Letting men die is a money-saving device. Safety costs money… as one safety official put it, ‘When everything is hurry, hurry, hurry, when you start pressuring people and taking shortcuts, things can go wrong. And then people die.’ No. And then men die.“

—  Warren Farrell, book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 119.

„Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don't let yourself believe it will happen to you.“

—  Muhammad Ali African American boxer, philanthropist and activist 1942 - 2016

„In a population of hundreds of millions, such a small number of people is a mere drop in the bucket… but enough drops can make any bucket overflow“

—  Neal Shusterman American novelist 1962

Source: UnDivided