Quotes About Death

DR. JOHN SNOW—This well-known physician died at noon on the 16th instant, at his house in Sackville-street, from an attack of apoplexy. His researches on chloroform and other anaesthetics were appreciated by the profession.

But, seriously, when in history did fear of death ever come between a man and his drugs?

Most people are so afraid of dying they never live.

Hallucinogens then do the same job as religion - they provide proof of unity, which is still the only known cure for fear of death.

Me pregunto por qué los brillantes puntitos del cielo no nos resultan tan asequibles como los puntos negros que llenan el mapa de Francia. Cogemos un tren para ir de Tarascón a Ruán, pero para llegar hasta una estrella hemos de morir. Sin duda, hay algo cierto en este razonamiento: no podemos alcanzar estrella alguna mientras sigamos vivos, igual que ya no podemos coger el tren una vez muertos. (Vincent Van Gogh, en una carta a tu hermano Theo).

Vincent's reading would eventually range far beyond the books approved by his parents. But these early exposures set the trajectory. He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died. He would start with one book by an author and then devour the entire oeuvre in a few weeks.

The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but captures a real fact about human psychology. (p. 220)

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence. Death becomes a mere rite of passage, like puberty or a midlife crisis.

The final problem is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and so on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy.

the political scientist James Payne suggests that ancient peoples put a low value on other people's lives because pain and death were so common in their own. This set a low threshold for any practice that had a chance of bringing them an advantage, even if the price was the lives of others.

The improved odds of a natural death came with another price, captured by the Roman historian Tacitus: "Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws." The Bible stories we examined in chapter 1 suggest that the first kings kept their subjects in awe with totalistic ideologies and brutal punishments.

homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide.

No one can deny the difference between life and death or the existence of suffering, but it takes indoctrination to hold beliefs about what becomes of an immortal soul after it has parted company from the body.

When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages. The flaw has been pointed out many times.

I have never killed a man , but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

We see the clash between nationalism and humanism in morbid patriotic slogans like "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" (Sweet and right it is to die for your country) and "Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.

Nor is it sweet and right to clasp death in order to prevent a province from seceding, expand a sphere of influence, or carry out an irredentist crusade

States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

We see the clash between nationalism and humanism in morbid patriotic slogans like "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" (Sweet and right it is to die for your country) and "Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory."4 Even John F. Kennedy's less gruesome "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" makes the tension clear.

Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.

Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about fifty Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than four thousand Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of . . ."), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.

Only love and death will change all things.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.