Quotes about die
page 31

“White collar conservative flashin' down the street,
Pointing that plastic finger at me,
Hoping soon my kind will drop and die,
But I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

If 6 Was 9
Song lyrics, Axis: Bold as Love (1967)

Hope

“All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals,
true, but to die of hunger, starve to death—
that's the worst of all.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XII. 342–343 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Death, Hunger, Hate, Way

“Die then. This is my cure for sore knees.”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), Suldrun's Garden (1983), Chapter 26, section 4 (p. 299)

“You shall receive me when the clouds are high
With evening and the sheep attain the fold.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"Ballade to Our Lady of Czestochowa"
Hilaire Belloc (1925)

Faith

“President Obama keeps insisting that ISIS is not Islamic. Well, maybe they don't practice the Muslim faith the same way he does, but if vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe, and they do, that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea, or drawing a cartoon, or writing a book, or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS, it has too much in common with ISIS. There's so much talk … about wiping out ISIS. You can't, not with bombs. You can only expose that something is a bad idea … Cultures are different. It's okay to judge that rule of law isn't just different than theocracy, it's better. If you don't see that, you're either a religious fanatic or a masochist, but one thing you certainly are not is a liberal. To count yourself as a liberal, you have to stand up for liberal principles. Free speech, separation of church and state, freedom to practice any religion or no religion without the threat of violence. Respect for minorities including homosexuals, equality for women.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/09/27/maher_rips_liberals_over_islam_if_were_giving_no_quarter_to_intolerance_shouldnt_we_start_with_honor_killers.html September 26, 2014. Real Time with Bill Maher

Women, Books, World, Faith

“The Ymir and Kong before him are both creatures wrenched from their natural environment against their will and finally killed by man. Although these creatures must always die, they should go out with a touch of pathos.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 98

Nature

“Music is my life, if I am without music or if I can't sing any more, I die, I'm nothing…because music is everything.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Life, Music, Singing

“Marcus Aurelius appoints personal character and conscience the ultimate refuge of happiness-seekers: the only place where dreams of happiness, doomed to die childless and intestate anywhere else, are not bound to be frustrated.”

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 35.

Happiness, Dreams, Personality

“Many, if not most, good ideas die young — mainly from neglect on the part of the parents, but sometimes from over-fondness. Once well started, an opinion had better be left to shift for itself.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

The Art of Propagating Opinion
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part X - The Position of a HomoUnius Libri

Idea, Parent, Parting

“Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me;
But since that I
Must die at last, 'tis best,
To use my self in jest
Thus by feigned deaths to die.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Song (Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go), stanza 1

Love, Death, World, Hope

“The wind breath'd soft as lover's sigh,
And, oft renew'd, seem'd oft to die,
With breathless pause between,
O who, with speech of war and woes,
Would wish to break the soft repose
Of such enchanting scene!”

Walter Scott The Lord of the Isles

Canto IV, stanza 13.
The Lord of the Isles (1815)

War, Lovers

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Septimus, Act I
Arcadia (1993)

Life, Disease, Travel, Mathematics

“When I die
let the black rag fly
raven falling
from the sky.”

George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic

"Black Flag" in Collected Poems (1983)

Flying

“It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. It is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes, but the fact that the police arrive a little late or are a little slower afoot does not always justify killing the suspect.”

Byron White (1917–2002) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, American football player

Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985).

“I was weak and pathetic and I couldn't control myself. An explanation, especially a bullshit one, doesn't alter the circumstances. I need to change, I have to change, and at this point, change is my only option, unless I am ready to die. All that matters is that I make myself something else and someone else for the future.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

A Million Little Pieces (2003)

Change, Future

“When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”

John Green book Looking for Alaska

Miles "Pudge" Halter, pp. 220-221
Looking for Alaska (2005)

Stupidity, Smile, Thinking, Change

“They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 31

Food, Home, Thinking, Study

“This country … abounds in that Cuba is a heaven in the spiritual sense of the word, and we prefer to die in heaven than serve in hell.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech at the First World Congress on Literacy (2 February 2005) paraphrasing a line in John Milton's Paradise Lost; quoted in Granma

Hell, Sense, Country

“He
That kills himself to avoid misery, fears it,
And, at the best, shows but a bastard valour.
This life's a fort committed to my trust,
Which I must not yield up till it be forc'd.
—Nor will I. He's not valiant that dares die,
But he that boldly bears calamity.”

Philip Massinger The Maid of Honour

The Maid of Honour (c. 1621; printed 1632), Act IV, scene iii.

Life, Fear

“I will stand against those who see terrorism when Americans die, but who see suicide bombers who kill Israelis and believe that that is just part of the negotiating process.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Israel's Independence Day Festival, April 21, 2002. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/02_04_21israel.htm. 2002

Suicide, Parting

“Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there. Minor parties have been attached to some special idea or interest, and they have generally expressed their positions through firm and identifiable programs and principles. Their function has not been to win or govern, but to agitate, educate, generate new ideas, and supply the dynamic element in our political life. When a third party's demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears. Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter III, part I, p. 97

Life, Education, Idea, Bee

“O-o-old habits die hard when you got, when you got a sentimental heart
Piece of the puzzle, you're my missing part
Oh what can you do with a sentimental heart?”

Zooey Deschanel (1980) American actress, musician, and singer-songwriter

"Sentimental Heart".
She & Him : Volume One (2008)

Heart, Parting

“We’re going to have some very unpleasant circumstances. There are some people that are going to die in protesting construction of this pipeline. We have to understand that. … Nevertheless, we have to be willing to enforce the law once it’s there … It’s going to take some fortitude to stand up.”

David A. Dodge (1943) Canadian economist

About the Trans Mountain Pipeline, as quoted in People 'are going to die' protesting Trans Mountain pipeline: Former Bank of Canada governor https://edmontonjournal.com/business/energy/people-are-going-to-die-protesting-trans-mountain-pipeline-former-bank-of-canada-governor (June 13, 2018) by Gordon Kent, Edmonton Journal.

People, Law, Understanding

“Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

"Nephelidia", line 16, from The Heptalogia (1880); Swinburne intended "Nephelidia" as a self-parody.

Life, Light

“A man should live forever, or die trying.”

Spider Robinson book Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (1977) "A voice is heard in Ramah"
Off the Wall at Callahan's (2004)
Variant: A person should live forever, or die trying.

“I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990), On the Rainy River

War, Sadness

“In men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other men; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than those of other men [Wie seine Ekstasen gewaltiger sind als die der anderen, so sind auch seine Depressionen fürchterlicher]. Every great man has such periods, of longer or shorter duration, times in which he loses self-confidence, … times in which, indeed, he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but which are devoid of the stimulus to production.”

Otto Weininger (1880–1903) austrian philosopher and writer

Collected Aphorisms

Men, Penalty, Feeling, Confidence

“Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1830s, Sir Walter Scott (1838)

Truth, Past

“As the liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Shall die fighting or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Song for the Luddites http://readytogoebooks.com/LB-Luddites.htm (1816).

Boy, Freedom, Fight, Sea

“Debbie Reynolds died a day after her daughter [Carrie Fisher] did! Black Mama's don't die cuz they kids do! They cry and say God don't make no mistakes!”

D. L. Hughley (1963) American actor and comedian

Commenting on the death of Carrie Fisher, and the death one day later of her mother Debbie Reynolds.
Source: [http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2016/12/29/dl-hughley-slammed-for-debbie-reynolds-tweet/95954690/

God, Daughters, Cry

“Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Age

“Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 19

Death, Flowers, Knowledge, Freedom

“The people in Micronesia, they not like before. Before, everybody, man and woman, they learn about the culture and navigation. But now, nobody like learn, because they use the GPS and the motorboat. But what you going to do when the GPS broke, or the engine broke? You just gonna follow the wind and the current away, and maybe die in the ocean.”

Mau Piailug (1932–2010) Micronesian navigator from the Carolinian island of Satawal and a teacher of traditional, non-instrument wa…

From Ferrar, Derek (March 2006). "Papa Mau's Legacy". Ka Wai Ola o OHA. 23 (3):13.

People, Learning

“People die when they are ready to die, for reasons that are their own. No person dies without a reason. You are not taught that, however, so people do not recognize their own reasons for dying, and they are not taught to recognize their own reasons for living — because you are told that life itself is an accident in a cosmic game of chance.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 835
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, (1981)

Life, People, Game, Chance

“I am the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism. I am the contemporary of a strange twilight when the clouds above are dissolving amid the clash of arms and the cries of the tortured. The only revolution I know, the one which may grant notoriety to this century, is the Nazi plague and red fascism. Hitler did not die in Berlin. Conqueror of his conquerors, he won the war in the stormy night into which he plunged Europe. Stalin did not die in Moscow nor at the Twentieth Congress. He is here among us, a stowaway in the history that he still haunts and bends to his mad will. You say the world is doing well? It's certain in any case that it keeps on going, since it isn't changing. But never before has the will to death become so nakedly and cynically unleashed. For the first time the gods have left us, no doubt weary of wandering on the plain of ashes where we have made our home. And I am writing in an age of Barbarism which is already, silently, remaking the world of men.”

Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948) French film director and philosopher

Source: Barbarism with a Human Face (1977), p. ix

Death, Men, God, War

“William too closed his eyes and prayed, but his world had lost its anchor. The Calvinist code which had dominated and supported him throughout his life seemed unequal to his present confusion. It was now apparent that predestination was a meaningless concept—certainly to one who had been told that his actions would directly affect the outcome of history for all time. But did that necessarily negate his faith entirely? Copernicus established that the earth orbited around the sun. Did God die in that moment?
Or did man merely understand a little better?”

Melinda M. Snodgrass (1951) American writer

Source: Queen's Gambit Declined (1989), Chapter 5 (p. 69)

Life, God, World, Faith

“I don't know you, ma'am, and apparently I'm expected to die for you.”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Enchantment (1999)

“Race jokes are kind of like orcas: powerful and entertaining, but you put them on display in the wrong environment and people are going to get hurt, and the joke might die. Like this one just did. (12 April 2016”

Trevor Noah (1984) South African comedian

The Daily Show Source: Visibile in Bill de Blasio's Questionable Joke http://www.cc.com/video-clips/g0ng5b/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-bill-de-blasio-s-questionable-joke, CC.com, 12 aprile 2016.

People, Hurt

“Live Free or Die Hard may work better for an audience that doesn't know much about the series is than it will for Die Hard die hards, who will be wondering who that impersonator is and what he did with the real John McClane. The original Die Hard came out of nowhere to blitz the 1988 summer box office. The fourth installment arrives with a weight of expectations that Atlas would have trouble shouldering and, when the dust settles in September, it's unlikely that Live Free or Die Hard will be one of this year's big success stories.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=310 of Live Free or Die Hard (2007). Two-and-a-half star reviews

Success, Summer, Box

“If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England and it would stop there only because it could go no lower.”

Flann O'Brien (1911–1966) Irish writer

Page 283
The Best of Myles (1968)

“The expression "Making a mountain out of a molehill" simply means making a big deal out of something that is actually a small deal, and it is easy to see how this expression came about. Molehills are simply mounds of earth serving as condominiums for moles, and they have never caused anyone harm except for maybe a stubbed toe if you were walking around the wilderness without any shoes on. Mountains, however, are very large mounds of earth and are constantly causing problems. They are very tall, and when people try to climb them they often fall off, or get lost and die of starvation. Sometimes, two countries fight over who really owns a mountain, and thousands of people have to go to war and come home grumpy or wounded. And, of course, mountains serve as homes to mountain goats and mountain lions, who enjoy attacking helpless picnickers and eating sandwiches or children. So when someone is making a mountain out of a molehill, they are pretending that something is as horrible as a war or a ruined picnic when it is really only as horrible as a stubbed toe.”

Daniel Handler book The Austere Academy

The Austere Academy (2000)

War, Children, People, Shoe

““Damn you!" Dagenham raged, “Don’t you realize that you can’t trust people? They don’t know enough for their own good.”
“Then let them learn or die. We’re all in this together. Let’s live or die together.””

Alfred Bester book The Stars My Destination

Source: The Stars My Destination (1956), Chapter 16 (pp. 254-255).

People, Learning, Rage

“"About the Seduction of an Angel" [Über die Verführung von Engeln]; the poem actually stems from Brecht's own pen, but Brecht signed it with the name of his contemporary, fellow German author (in exile) Thomas Mann”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

As cited in Gregory Alexander Knott, Arnold Stadler: Heimat and Metaphysics http://books.google.gr/books?id=ylhXAAAAYAAJ&q=, Weidler Buchverlag, 2009, p. 30.

Angels

“Until now, I had misunderstood the Satori, enlightenment of Zen Buddhism.
I had thought that satori is to die without fear anytime. But it is a wrong guess.
The satori is to live unconcernedly anytime.”

Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) Japanese poet, author, and literary critic in Meiji period Japan

Jusqu'à maintenant, j'avais mal compris le Satori, ou l'objectif final du bouddhisme zen.
Je pensais que le satori est de mourir sans peur à tout moment. Mais il est fausse supposition.
Le satori est de vivre sereinement en tout temps.
Byōshō-rokushaku

Fear

“Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? in every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Letter, written in collaboration with Dr John Arbuthnot, to Jonathan Swift (December 5, 1732) upon the death of John Gay.

God, Parting

“We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Far from the Tree

Love, Children, Exercises, Imagination

“I remember I was In the tanning salon
When I heard that River Phoenix was gone
They say that only the good die young
But that ain't true where I come from
California, California”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

California by Belinda Carlisle

“Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 256.

Falseness

“Tis immortality to die aspiring,
As if a man were taken quick to heaven.”

George Chapman The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron

Act I, scene i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608)

“Of course there is no prima facie reason why cheap things should be ugly, for a die or mould of a good design costs no more than a bad one; but still the fact remains that the objects in use in every-day life are not beautiful, and it is to effect a change in this respect that the Government have established Schools of Design and the excellent Museum of which I shall have to speak hereafter.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 1 : Preface

Life, School, Beauty, Change

“Our hopes are high. Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong. And our dreams for this beautiful country will never die.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Farewell speech to the Liberal Party http://www.primeministers.ca/trudeau/bio_9.php?context=b (14 June 1984)

People, Faith, Beauty, Dreams

“My only regret is to die four pages too soon.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

Final television interview with Melvyn Bragg (5 April 1994)

“Our national story has its full share of grief and pain as well as triumph and expectation. But through it all, hope remains and dreams do not die.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Third Session of Parliament (June 30, 2007)

Pain, Dreams, Hope

“So she might die here—well, she could have died anywhere, so who cared where? That didn’t interest her. Life and mystery, that interested her. Perhaps she would have been keener on death and its processes if she’d had a religious side, but to her the religions of the ages were all mixed up in her head, a ceaselessly overworked agglutination of thousands of years of responding to the fears she didn’t possess.”

Justina Robson book Natural History

Source: Natural History (2003), Chapter 30 “Communication Failure” (p. 301)

Life, Death, Age, Fear

“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

Pt. 1, ch. 4, sct. 1
The Comedians (1966)

Life, Fear, Law, Mathematics

“You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.”

Stephen King book The Stand

The Stand (1978)

Women, Men, God, People

“Now, a new creature, I in Christ am born,
The old man stripped away; -- I am new-made;
And mounting in me, like the sun at morn,
Love breaks my heart, even as a broken blade:
Christ, First and Only Fair, from me hath shorn
My will, my wits, and all that in me stayed,
I in His arms am laid,
I cry and call --
O Thou my All,
O let me die of Love!”

Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) Italian Franciscan mystic

From All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time, As air becomes the medium for light when the sun rises, and as wax melts from the heat of fire, so the soul drawn to that light is resplendent, feels self melt awayby Robert Ellsberg

Love, Sun, Heart, Christ

“We must bear our crosses; self is the greatest of them all. If we die in part every day of our lives, we shall have but little to do on the last. O how utterly will these little daily deaths destroy the power of the final dying!”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 170.

Death, Parting

“Dear, was it really you and I?
In truth the riddle's ill to read,
So many are the deaths we die
Before we can be dead indeed.”

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) English poet, critic and editor

Source: Poems (1898), Rhymes And Rhythms, XV

Death, Truth, Reading, Dead

“You have to see where the market is going. I always believe there is no sunset business. It’s all in the mindset because if you give up, then you die.”

Sukanto Tanoto (1949) Indonesian businessman

On film and Eastman Kodak, Globe Asia Interview, Sep, 2015. http://www.inside-rge.com/Sukanto-Tanoto-Resource-King-GlobeAsia 2015

Business

“We are able to discern not only what we already are, but what we may become, to see in ourselves germs and promises of a growth to which no bounds can be set, to dart beyond what we have actually gained to the idea of perfection as the end of our being. It is by this self-comprehending power that we are distinguished from the brutes, which give no signs of looking into themselves. Without this there would be no self-culture, for we should not know the work to be done; and one reason why self-culture is so little proposed is, that so few penetrate into their own nature. To most men, their own spirits are shadowy, unreal, compared with what is outward. When they happen to cast a glance inward, they see there only a dark, vague chaos. They distinguish, perhaps, some violent passion, which has driven them to injurious excess; but their highest powers hardly attract a thought; and thus multitudes live and die as truly strangers to themselves as to countries of which they have heard the name, but which human foot has never trodden.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Men, Idea, Nature, Passion

“Unblemish'd let me live, or die unknown;
O grant an honest fame, or grant me none!”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Closing line.
The Temple of Fame (1711)

“The next higher level is to work, fight, and sometimes die for your own immediate family. This is the level at which six pounds of mother cat can be so fierce that she'll drive off a police dog. It is the level at which a father takes a moonlighting job to keep his kids in college — and the level at which a mother or father dives into a flood to save a drowning child … and it is still moral behavior even when it fails.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

The Pragmatics of Patriotism (1973)

Family, Dogs, Behavior, Cats

“We need strong leadership, not cowards who are begging petrol dollars and wanting a block Islamic vote. We need a leader not an appeaser. I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Stand up for what u believe. Never be intimidated by anyone #english #nosurrender.”

Tommy Robinson (1982) English right-wing activist

Tweet quoted in "Woolwich Beheading: EDL Leader Tommy Robinson Tweets Own Death Threats", Internation Business Times (23 May 2013) http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tommy-robinson-edl-death-threats-woolwich-terrorism-470472 2013

Strong

“As a nation, we English will fight and die for principles we cannot find time to teach in our free schools.”

Margery Allingham (1904–1966) English writer of detective fiction

The Oaken Heart

School, Time, Fight

“That'll be the day — when you say goodbye.
That'll be the day — when you make me cry.
You say you're gonna leave — you know it's a lie, 'cause
That'll be the day when I die.”

Buddy Holly (1936–1959) American singer-songwriter

That'll Be the Day, written by Buddy Holly, Jerry Allison, and Norman Petty
Song lyrics, The "Chirping" Crickets (1957)

Lie, Cry

“What ends up happening with musicians and actors is, they're famous, so when somebody has an issue, it's something that gets talked about. People die of drug overdoses every day that nobody talks about. It's a shame that famous people get all the focus, because it then gets glorified a little bit, like, 'This person was too sensitive for the world,' and, 'A light twice as bright lives half as long,' and all that. Which is all bullshit. It's not true.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Chris Cornell talks about his latest reinvention, living in Florida, Tampa Bay Times, 9 June 2016 http://www.tampabay.com/things-to-do/music/rocker-is-in-tune-with-florida-life/2280927, Soundgarden Era

People, World, Light, Personality

“Let's make it clear for the dimmest bulbs among you: the kids at Columbine High didn't die from too many guns, they died from too few. I'm not suggesting that the teachers should have carried guns — not as franchised agents of the state. They should have carried guns as ordinary individuals, exercising a sacred right, and in performance of a solemn duty to protect the young lives that were placed — very foolishly, as it turned out — in their hands.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Murder by Gun Control".

Exercises, Teachers

“Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

The Washington Post, 1983 November 13

People

“But it was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors, who don't have as long to live, might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them. Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

2009-09-24
The Huckabee Report
Radio, quoted in * 2009-09-28
Huckabee: Kennedy Would Have Been Urged To Die Earlier Under ObamaCare
The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/28/huckabee-kennedy-would-ha_n_271605.html
referring to Obama saying, in ABC's "Questions for the President: Prescription for America" forum on , "But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that's not making anybody's mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller."

Life, Pain, Home, Future

“Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you’re all gonna die and then you’re gonna be dead for way longer than you’re alive. Like that’s mostly what you’re ever gonna be. You’re just dead people that didn’t die yet.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://splitsider.com/2013/02/the-annotated-wisdom-of-louis-c-k/

People, Way, Dead

“I have never observed that the religious are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.”

H. Rider Haggard book The Ancient Allan

The Ancient Allan (1920), CHAPTER I, OLD FRIEND

“I'm reading Günther Anders' Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Antiquity of Man).. That bit about Promethean shame impressed me.. observations about the shame of being oneself, the reluctance at stepping out of line, of being forward, of being looked at. This is entirely true to life…Yet it's just as natural to man to want to be seen, to want to be outstanding, to be regarded, as to want to hide - and both these instincts - for that's what they are - clash, often with equal force…How clearly I see the Little Flower in this light: from earliest days the focal point for her whole family, yet on the other hand sincerely desiring to be hidden, taking the veil”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

and so wonderfully unveiled to posterity, revealed to the world, set up as an image, i.e. to be looked at!
Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59.

Life, World, Family, Flowers

“Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

Qui serait assez insensé pour mourir sans avoir fait au moins le tour de sa prison?
The Highroad, p. 11
The Abyss (1968)

“The more people die, the more things stay the same.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Lullaby (2002)

People

“Oh, so you're one of those sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig; how's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig? You got nothing better to do than to put me down, you piece of garbage? You got nothing to do today? Go eat a sausage, and choke on it. Get trichinosis. Now do we have another nice caller here who's busy because he didn't have a nice night in the bathhouse who's angry at me today? Put another, put another sodomite on… No more calls? …I don't care about these bums; they mean nothing to me. They're all sausages.”

Michael Savage book The Savage Nation

The Savage Nation The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2003-07-07 Radio (Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMtrpHjD2is) 2003

Business, Night

“How ironic the difference between me and my young son Absalom, between his soliciting the soundest means of overtaking me and having my life, while I was cudgeling my brains for a way to spare his. "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom," were my mawkish words to my commanders as their men trooped past me toward the positions they would take up in the field outside the wood of Ephraim for the battle in which he would die. "Beware that none touch the young man Absalom," I urged like a fool. No, not like a fool, but like a fond, doting father who will overlook and excuse everything in the child he loves best, and who breaks his heart. And in that singular disparity in our desires abides his lasting victory over me: I loved him and he did not love me.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

Love, Life, Men, Fools

“Some Days retired from the rest
In soft distinction lie,
The Day that a companion came—
Or was obliged to die.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

The Single Hound, p. 271
Collected Poems (1993)

Lie

“Yes, it is a truth that for a good man,— honored, beloved, useful,— with all around him that God ever gives to His children here;— nay, with all that God could give him of earth, it would be " gain " to die. Heaven is a better, a happier, a more desirable world than this is or can be.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 308.

God, Children, Truth, World

“For us, it is conquer or die. This is a unique burden for the white man, that our fate is entirely in our hands.”

Richard Bertrand Spencer (1978) American white supremacist

Fate

“If it could be shown that the great Trust magnate or the great Aristocratic landowner, apart from the advantages of his inherited wealth, was a more highly developed species of humanity than the poor struggling sempstress or the unemployed docker, then there might be some justification for allowing the docker and the sempstress as the representatives of a weaker class to die out in order to enable the more highly developed creature to survive; but one moment's reflection will show that the alleged superiority of the landowner or the Trust magnate rests on one fact alone, namely, that he owns certain material possessions, usually inherited, which enable him to dictate the terms upon which his less fortunate fellow creatures shall be permitted to live.”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), pp. 4-5

Wealth

“Maeterlinck says that compared with ordinary truths mystic truths have strange privileges—they can neither age nor die. Beauty is eternal and ugliness, thank God, is ephemeral. Can there be any question as to which should attract the poet?”

Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) American writer and poet

The New York Times (10 December 1916) From "Godlessness Mars Most Contemporary Poetry." http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9A0CE2D7153BE233A25753C1A9649D946796D6CF

God, Truth, Age, Beauty

“We need to send the message that anyone who orders suicide bombings against Americans, or protects those who do, commits suicide himself. And U. S. marines will search every cave in Afghanistan to make that principle stick. You order, you die — absolutely, positively, you die.”

Thomas Friedman (1953) American journalist and author

New York Times (6 January 2002) "Someone Tell the Kids".

Search, Suicide

“Had Abraham Lincoln died from any of the numerous ills to which flesh is heir; had he reached that good old age of which his vigorous constitution and his temperate habits gave promise; had he been permitted to see the end of his great work; had the solemn curtain of death come down but gradually, we should still have been smitten with a heavy grief, and treasured his name lovingly. But dying as he did die, by the red hand of violence, killed, assassinated, taken off without warning, not because of personal hate, for no man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him, but because of his fidelity to union and liberty, he is doubly dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever. Fellow citizens, I end, as I began, with congratulations. We have done a good work for our race today. In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator, we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us. We have been fastening ourselves to a name and fame imperishable and immortal; we have also been defending ourselves from a blighting scandal. When now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors; when the foul reproach of ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Death, Hate, Age, Color

“He that always waits upon God is ready whenever He calls. Neglect not to set your accounts even; he is a happy man who to lives as that death at all times may find him at leisure to die.”

Owen Feltham (1602–1668) English writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 180.

Death, God, Happiness, Time

“Nations with nations mix'd confus'dly die,
And lost in one promiscuous carnage lie.”

Joseph Addison The Campaign

Source: The Campaign (1704), Line 152.

Lie

“David Brody: Radical Islam: to Evangelicals, this is a bread and butter issue. You said there's a Muslim problem in this country. What do you mean by that exactly?
Donald Trump: Bill O'Reilly asked me is there a Muslim problem? And I said absolutely, yes. In fact I went a step further. I said I didn't see Swedish people knocking down the World Trade Center. It was very interesting. I thought that was going to be a controversial statement and somebody, I think it was Dennis Miller introduced me, he was doing like an analysis of me, he said, I love it. The guy said what the truth is. He didn't mince his words. He didn't say, 'Oh, gee, no there's not a Muslim problem, everybody's wonderful.' And by the way, many, many, most Muslims are wonderful people, but is there a Muslim problem? Look what's happening. Look what happened right here in my city with the World Trade Center and lots of other places. So I said it and I thought it was going to be very controversial but actually it was very well received. I think people want the truth. I think they're tired of politicians. They're tired of politically correct stuff. I mean I could have said, 'Oh absolutely not Bill, there's no Muslim problem, everything is wonderful, just forget about the World Trade Center.' But you have to speak the truth. We're so politically correct that this country is falling apart.
Brody: With some evangelicals there are some problems with the teachings of the Koran. Do you have concerns about the Koran?
Trump: Well, I'll tell you what. The Koran is very interesting. A lot of people say it teaches love and there is a very big group of people who really understand the Koran far better than I do. I'm certainly not an expert, to put it mildly. But there's something there that teaches some very negative vibe. I mean things are happening, when you look at people blowing up all over the streets that are in some of the countries over in the Middle East, just blowing up a super market with not even soldiers, just people, when 250 people die in a super market that are shopping, where people die in a store or in a street. There's a lot of hatred there that's some place. Now I don't know if that's from the Koran. I don't know if that's from some place else. But there's tremendous hatred out there that I've never seen anything like it. So, you have two views. You have the view that the Koran is all about love and then you have the view that the Koran is, that there's a lot of hate in the Koran.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

On CBN News' "The Brody File" (12 April 2011) ( video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWzDAvemJG8) ( transcript http://blogs.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2011/04/12/brody-file-exclusive-donald-trump-says-something-in-koran-teaches.aspx) 2010s, 2011

Love, Hate, People, Truth

“In the day I can smile though I wanna die / Hold on, hold on / I can keep it together for a little while / and be strong, so strong / But when the sun goes down and I'm all alone / I haven't the strength to fight / That's when my tears give in to the night”

Kim Wilde (1960) English pop singer

Hold on
Now & Forever (1995)

Smile, Tear, Strong, Sun

“For ‘im that doth not work must surely die;
But that's no reason man should labour all
‘Is life on one same shift—life's none so long.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Sestina of the Tramp-Royal, Stanza 4 (1896).
The Seven Seas (1896)

Life

“She is not concerned about what I think about it or what Mrs. King thinks about it. She wants it. She’s a child and that’s very natural and normal for a child. She is inevitably self-centered because she’s a child. But when one matures, when one rises above the early years of childhood, he begins to love people for their own sake. He turns himself to higher loyalties. He gives himself to something outside of himself. He gives himself to causes that he lives for and sometimes will even die for. He comes to the point that now he can rise above his individualistic concerns”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)
Context: I look at my little daughter every day and she wants certain things and when she wants them, she wants them. And she almost cries out, “I want what I want when I want it.” She is not concerned about what I think about it or what Mrs. King thinks about it. She wants it. She’s a child and that’s very natural and normal for a child. She is inevitably self-centered because she’s a child. But when one matures, when one rises above the early years of childhood, he begins to love people for their own sake. He turns himself to higher loyalties. He gives himself to something outside of himself. He gives himself to causes that he lives for and sometimes will even die for. He comes to the point that now he can rise above his individualistic concerns, and he understands then what Jesus meant when he says, “He who finds his life shall lose it; he who loses his life for my sake, shall find it.”’ In other words, he who finds his ego shall lose his ego, but he who loseth his ego for my sake, shall find it. And so you see people who are apparently selfish; it isn’t merely an ethical issue but it is a psychological issue. They are the victims of arrested development, and they are still children. They haven’t grown up. And like a modern novelist says about one of his characters, “Edith is a little country, bounded on the east and the west, on the north and the south, by Edith.” And so many people are little countries, bounded all around by themselves and they never quite get out of themselves. And these are the persons who are victimized with arrested development.

Love, People, Nature, Thinking