Assisted Suicide Quotes

For us, it was never about death. It was about life. Knowing that there was a way out, and that his suffering was not going to become unendurable, was the one thing that allowed Mr. Peterson to go on living, much longer than he would have otherwise wanted. It was the weeks leading up to our pact that were shrouded in darkness and despair; after its inception, life became a meaningful prospect once more. ~ Gavin Extence

By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel

Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I argue that in a world where people must support their opinions with evidence and reason rather than faith, we would experience less conflict over issues like assisted suicide, gay rights, birth control, and sexual morality. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life? ~ Sue Rodriguez

curing' victims of multiple-personality disorder is actually tantamount to serial murder. The issue has remained controversial in the wake of recent findings that the human brain can potentially contain up to one hundred forty fully-sentient personalities without significant sensory/motor impairment. The tribunal will also consider whether encouraging a multiple personality to reintegrate voluntarily - again, a traditionally therapeutic act - should be redefined as assisted suicide. Cross-linked to next item under cognition and legal. ~ Peter Watts

I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution. ~ Stephen Hawking

There is a difference between a person who is dying and a person who is suicidal. I do not want to die. I am dying. ~ Brittany Maynard

Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured. ~ Andrew Coyne

First of all, in principle, I'm against physician-assisted suicide, and secondly, I believe it is the prerogative of the federal government to control drug rules. And the idea of using a controlled substance to end somebody's life is something I don't agree with. I can see the idea of using controlled substances to ease somebody's pain. That makes sense. ~ George W. Bush

But the fact that, by 2012, one in thirty-five Dutch people sought assisted suicide at their death is not a measure of success. It is a measure of failure. Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end. The Dutch have been slower than others to develop palliative care programs that might provide for it. One reason, perhaps, is that their system of assisted death may have reinforced beliefs that reducing suffering and improving lives through other means is not feasible when one becomes debilitated or seriously ill. ~ Atul Gawande

Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been profound ethical issues confronting doctors since the birth of Western medicine, more than 2,000 years ago. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel

The central argument of this book is that there is a solid moral and practical basis for the laws against assisted suicide that now exist in the United States and elsewhere. Furthermore, ~ Arthur J. Dyck

With terminal illness, your fate is sealed. Morally, we're more comfortable with a situation where you don't cause death, but you hasten it. We think that's a bright line. Comparing the U.S. with Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal for patients suffering 'intolerable health problems.' ~ Arthur Caplan

A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life. Now he inquires whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is: From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction. It is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self-love can become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; hence that maxim cannot possibly exist as a universal law of nature, and consequently would be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of all duty. ~ Immanuel Kant

I lived my whole life following others' wishes. Let me follow my own wish in my death. ~ Shon Mehta

Yolandi, the central character in the book "All My Puny Sorrows" says that "the core of the argument for it [assisted suicide] is maximizing individual autonomy and minimizing human suffering" (p. 222). ~ Miriam Toews

I'm for the death penalty, I'm pro-abortion, I'm pro-assisted suicide, I'm pro-regular suicide. Anything that'll get the traffic moving. ~ Bill Maher

I don't mind a bit being labelled a suicide. ~ Al Purdy

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Don't approve of gay marriage? Don't have one. Don't approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ's sake, don't have one. But don't tell me I can't have one - each and every one - because it offends your God. ~ Dan Savage

Whenever the people are for gay marriage or medical marijuana or assisted suicide, suddenly the 'will of the people' goes out the window. ~ Bill Maher

Even then, she still held a secret passion for Mozart. When he died in 1791, her grief made her provoke the people into starting the French Revolution. Stepping up to the guillotine herself, she ordered the executioner to behead her, thereby committing assisted suicide. ~ Yasutaka Tsutsui

The whole notion of pain, and how every individual experiences pain, is up for debate. We don't know how another person experiences pain - physical pain or psychic pain. Some of these clinics where assisted suicide or euthanasia is practiced, they call it 'weariness of life.' ~ Miriam Toews

Everything about Wertheimer didn't come from Wertheimer himself, I said to myself now, everything about Wertheimer was always taken from somebody else, copied, he took everything from me, he copied me in everything, and so he even took my failure from me and copied it, I thought. Only his suicide was his own decision and came completely from him, I thought, and so he may have experienced, as they say, a sense of triumph in the end. And perhaps thus, by committing suicide on his own so to speak, he had outstripped me in everything, I thought. ~ Thomas Bernhard

The only person I've worked with on my album was Kanye. And between the stuff that I've done and the stuff that he's assisted on and produced for me for this album, I don't even need anything else. ~ Nick Cannon

Happy, thrice happy shall they be pronounced hereafter, who have contributed any thing, who have performed the meanest office in erecting this stupendous fabrick of Freedom and Empire on the broad basis of Independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of humane nature and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions. ~ George Washington

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. ~ John Fowles

I'm still kind of a mess. But I think we all are. No one's got it all together. I don't think you ever do get it totally together. Probably if you did manage to do it you'd spontaneously combust. I think that's a law of nature. If you ever manage to become perfect, you have to die instantly before you ruin things for everyone else. ~ Michael Thomas Ford

When someone isn't ready we must not try to force them out. People are being bullied and committing suicide because they're gay and it's horrible. ~ Ricky Martin

Surely there was nothing more pathetic than screwing up your own suicide. ~ Michael Marshall

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility. ~ Emil Cioran

Suicide is an extreme vote of no confidence in a society that doesn't work. ~ Sharif Abdullah

COPE

Create Options Pending Emergence ~ Kamil Ali

I know there must be other navigable paths where either nothing happens, that night or later, or where, when the idea to just pull the curtain on most things and then on everything, just because crosses my mind, I let the moment pass, and I go to sleep like everyone else did on my street that night. ~ John Darnielle

Part of me wonders if this is a suicide mission disguised as a game. ~ Veronica Roth

We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival. ~ Dalai Lama

I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave. ~ Spalding Gray

I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason. Little by little I guessed that there would be nothing in the future either. Then I left off being angry with people and almost ceased to notice them. Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock against people in the street. And not so much from being lost in thought: what had I to think about? I had almost given up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many there were! But I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Suppressing your capabilities with your fixed beliefs is a form of artistic suicide. ~ Neeraj Agnihotri

Seemingly suicidal, it's not. I never wanted to live. I wanted to be happy. Living was always accidental. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

As long as everyone thinks you're a cutter or tried to commit suicide you'll always be on the outs. ~ Katie McGarry

- Question. Would you die for me?
- Yes.
- That's too easy. Will you... Would you live for me? ... Hmm?
- Yes.
- Careful! Do not say this oath thoughtlessly! ... Desire becomes surrender, surrender becomes power. You want this?
- I do.
- Say it. Say it. Say it! Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty...
- Please?!
- Mm, God, you're so... good!
― Joker & Harley Quinn ~ Suicide Squad (2016 Movie Directed By David Ayer)

Where did my friend go? Was there a place they all gathered, the lost and self destructive? Was there a room they put them in? Necks burnt with rope or holes in their skulls. Beach-water bloated. I will know this at the end of my conversation with life. I will speak and laugh until my tongue falls out and then I will know this. I will know because he will tell me when I see him. How will I enter the theatre? With a hole in my head or exploded by sea. Wrists. ~ Brendan Cowell

The red washing
down the bathtub
can't change the color of the sea
at all. ~ Derrick Brown

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self - a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama - a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience. ~ William Styron

Suicide is one way of saying you're sorry. ~ Hanif Kureishi

I've thought a lot about suicide and near death experiences. I'm not saying I'm going to kill myself or anything. However, I've had a lot of passive thoughts about "what's the point?". I see life for what it is. We live, we procreate, we die. So the next gen can do it again. What's my purpose or point? Why bother? What do I have to live for? The near death experiences come in with me being curious about after life. If I knew I'd be okay would I just go there, would that change my mind about my purpose? ~ Ben Caesar

if sentient life recognised the futility of its existence, if it recognised that it had been born on the line and was eternally bonded to the perverted servitude of another who does not - and will never - hold council to discuss emancipation, then it is inevitable that birth rates among all self-aware creatures would plummet as reproduction itself would be viewed as an unconscionable and outrageous act of unforgivable selfishness. Being freely acting, morally autonomous, and presented with an insufferable reality, complex conscious life would find no option but to rebel, and to rebel completely by deploying the only weapon it had against the architect of its unforgiving world: a massive denial of service; self-administered, intentional extinction. Revolutionary suicide. ~ John Zande

Yes
or rather, it's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death. ~ Marya Hornbacher

Just a moment his own consciousness had plunged through his daddy's darkness to an incomprehensible word much more frightening than DIVORCE, and that word was SUICIDE. ~ Stephen King

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves. ~ William Arthur Ward

With all these forks in the roads of our path, why do so many choose to take the knife? ~ Anthony Liccione

I've always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I'm here to tell you that dreams really do come true. ~ Sarah Vowell

And of course, Japan, with the highest suicide statistics in the world, a country with an unquenchable thirst for the bizarre, the cruel and the terrible, would provide the perfect last refuge for him. ~ Ian Fleming

Maybe if we can find time to hug and cherish our families and the people around us, child suicide or college suicide wouldn't be rampant. ~ Uwem Akpan

I am a dumb piece of meat
and I rot everyday
my flesh gives a rotting smell
and people say it's the smell of life
and they come to me
and watch me rot
and get happy and upset and annoyed and disgusted and maybe sometimes feel
compassion
but they don't realize they are rotting too. ~ Daul Kim

When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him: "Why?" He replied: "Because no one admired me. ~ Stephen Crane

Do you know the strangest thing about being a soldier? It is that you are repeatedly ordered to commit suicide. and you obey. ~ Louis De Bernieres

When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Since every I is, in itself, fundamentally criminal in its attitude toward the State and the people, we must
recognize that to live is to transgress. Unless we accept death, we must be willing to kill in order to be
unique. "You are not as noble as a criminal, you who do not desecrate anything." Moreover Stirner, still
without the courage of his convictions, specifies: "Kill them, do not martyr them."
But to decree that murder is legitimate is to decree mobilization and war for all the Unique. Thus murder
will coincide with a kind of collective suicide. Stirner, who either does not admit or does not see this,
nevertheless does not recoil at the idea of any form of destruction. The spirit of rebellion finally discovers
one of its bitterest satisfactions in chaos. "You [the German nation] will be struck down. Soon your sister
nations will follow you; when all of them have gone your way, humanity will be buried, and on its tomb I,
sole master of myself at last, I, heir to all the human race, will shout with laughter." And so, among the
ruins of the world, the desolate laughter of the individual-king illustrates the last victory of the spirit of
rebellion. But at this extremity nothing else is possible but death or resurrection. Stirner, and with him all
the nihilist rebels, rush to the utmost limits, drunk with destruction. After which, when the desert has been
disclosed, the next step is to learn how to live there ~ Albert Camus

The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration is illuminating. ( ... ) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide. ~ Jean Baudrillard

After all, suicide is contagious. ~ Suzanne Young

I acknowledged that God is the sovereign Lord and I gave myself up completely. I guess it's a little bit like committing suicide, only with a higher purpose. ~ Annette Spratte

I think a lot about killing myself, not like a point on a map but rather like a glowing exit sign at a show that's never been quite bad enough to make me want to leave. See, when I'm up I don't kill myself because, holy shit, there's so much left to do. When I'm down I don't kill myself because then the sadness would be over, and the sadness is my old paint under the new. The sadness is the house fire or the broken shoulder: I'd still be me without it but I'd be so boring. ~ Neil Hilborn

For generations, parents have shaped 'fine' but deeply restless human beings. We may know 'how to act' but we're losing sight of how to love, how to bond, how to have healthy relationships. This is evident in our broken homes, the rise in depression and mental illness, suicide rates, and so forth. ~ Rebecca Eanes

But being in the closet uniquely assisted me in politics. From my first run for the state legislature until my election as governor, all too often I was not leading but following my best guess at public opinion. ~ James McGreevey