
“It's better to burn out than to fade away.”
Misattributed
Playboy interview (1980)
Context: It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison — it's garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo.
“It's better to burn out than to fade away.”
Misattributed
“It's better to burn out than to fade away.”
Quoted by Cobain in his suicide note, this is from the song My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) by Neil Young, from his album Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
Misattributed
Variant: It's better to burn out than fade away.
“Philosophies, like old soldiers, do not die, they merely fade away.”
Pragmatism and the Outlook of Modern Science (1966)
“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. ”
Hey Hey, My My, written with Jeff Blackburn; quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note.
Song lyrics, Rust Never Sleeps (1978)
Audio clip (ogg format)
1950s, Farewell address to Congress (1951)
Context: I am closing my 52 years of military service. When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all of my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that "old soldiers never die; they just fade away."
And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.
“I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.”
Audio clip (ogg format)
1950s, Farewell address to Congress (1951)
“I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.”
Source: A Severed Head