“Better red than dead.”
Bertrand Russell, attributes this phrase to 'West German friends of peace' but adopted this slogan for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament he helped found http://books.google.com/books?id=c4UoX6-Sv1AC&pg=PA49 William Safire, Safire's Political Dictionary, (2008) p. 49–50
Misattributed
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Bertrand Russell 562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970Related quotes
“Better a live donkey than a dead lion.”
Quoted in [Moss, Stephen, Captain Scott centenary: Storm rages around polar explorer's reputation, The Guardian, 28 March 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/mar/28/captain-scott-antarctic-centenary-profile]
“Better a live dog than a dead lion.”
Più tosto can vivo che leone morto.
Della Morte, p. 525.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 394.
“A living dog is better than a dead lion.”
Walden (1854)
Context: A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.<!--pp.366-367
“Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.”
Source: The Poems Of Wilfred Owen
“Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.”
Source: The Stand
“Flame out the living words of the dead
Written-in-red.”
"Written-In-Red" de Cleyre's last poem, dedicated "To Our Living Dead in Mexico's Struggle"; first lines.
Context: Written in red their protest stands,
For the Gods of the World to see;
On the dooming wall their bodiless hands
have blazoned "Upharsin," and flaring brands
Illumine the message: "Seize the lands!
Open the prisons and make men free!"
Flame out the living words of the dead
Written-in-red.
New England's Dead, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Source: 2010s, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010), Chapter 9, “America” (p. 113)