Cameron MacDonald Quotations

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Many advocates for a "right to die" would also like to see such opportunities expanded to include fully-competent patients with locked-in syndromes, quadriplegias, and other forms of extreme disability, specifically in cases where these victims express an ongoing and rational desire to die, but are physically incapable of ending their own lives. To deny such patients assistance is, to my own thinking, a form of torture by inaction.
- Jacob M. Appel, bioethicist, Next: Assisted Suicide for Healthy People, July 16, 2009.

If the healthy are granted the right to die, gray areas will inevitably arise. That does not mean that all areas are gray.
- Jacob M. Appel, bioethicist, Next: Assisted Suicide for Healthy People, July 16, 2009.

A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms.
- Jacob M. Appel, bioethicist, Next: Assisted Suicide for Healthy People, July 16, 2009.

I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient.
- Christiaan Barnard, cardiac surgeon

A long illness seems to be placed between life and death, in order to make death a comfort both to those who die and to those who remain.
- Jean de La Bruyere (1645–1696)

死神の附いた耳へは、意見も道理も入るまいとは思へど、さりとは愚痴の至り
- To the ears of one possessed by the God of Death, reason and objections seem like so many idle complaints.
- Chikamatsu Monzaemon, The Love Suicides at Amijima (1721)

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank – but that's not the same thing.
- Joseph Conrad

Death is my final civil liberty, and I do not choose to surrender it to the state, a church or a physician.
- Frederick Ellis

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
- Ben Franklin

The Wood of Suicides has changed since my last visit to Hell. I remember it as a tiny grove. Now it resembles a forest.
- Dream; Neil Gaiman, The Sandman #4

There are a great many ways to commit suicide, you know.
- Stephen King, The Stand (Uncut), chapter 55, p. 799, unidentified edition

There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: the nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.
- Arthur Koestler

Let us ask this of him: what is there that is so bitter, if sleep and peace be the end of life, to make one fade away in never-ending grief?
- Lucretius

Suicide kills two people. That's what it's for.
- Referring to the guilt and grief close surviving dependents feel after a suicide
- Arthur Miller, After the Fall

Suicide is not a solution
But it remains an excellent option
- Impaled Nazarene, "Nihil", Nihil (2000)

We cannot tear out a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire.
- George Sand, Mauprat (1837)

Dying
is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
- Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"

Death is before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man …
Like the longing of a man to see his home again
After many years of captivity …
- "Dispute between a man and his Ba", Egypt, ca. 2100 B.C.

Some people want to eke out every second of life – no matter how grim – and that is their right. But others do not. And that should be their right.
- Betty Rollin

He who does not accept and respect those who want to reject life does not truly accept and respect life itself.
- Thomas Szasz

It's not a thing to do while one is not in one's best mind. Never kill yourself while you are suicidal.
- Edwin Shneidman

When Goblins Kill themselves it's called stupidity. When Humans do it, it's called heroism.
- Shock Troopers, Magic: The Gathering

Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
- Mark Twain

Suicide? To tell you the truth, I disapprove of suicide more than anything.
- Vash The Stampede, "Trigun"

Suicide is self-expression.
- Type O Negative in "Gravitational Constant G = 6.67 × 10⁻⁸ cm⁻³gm⁻¹sec⁻²" on Slow, Deep and Hard (1991) [originally titled None More Negative]

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.
- Voltaire, "Cato", Philisophical Dictionary, 1764

It's better to burn out than to fade away.
- Neil Young, My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) on the album Rust Never Sleeps (1979). Quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note.