Death With Dignity Quotes & Sayings

We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die. — Primo Levi

I hope to die with dignity and not be on my death bed pondering the afterlife wearing a diaper named Depends. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

If the push towards life sustaining technology were balanced with options for comfort care in both medical school training and the healthcare culture, more people would have the chance to transition to death with dignity and grace. — Lisa J. Shultz

Give me the supreme courage of love, this is my prayer - the courage to speak, to do,
to suffer at thy will, to leave all things or be left alone.
Strengthen me on errands of danger, honour me with pain, and help me climb to that difficult mood which sacrifices daily to thee.
Give me the supreme confidence of love, this is my prayer - the confidence that belongs to life in death, to victory in defeat, to the power hidden in frailest beauty, to that dignity in pain which accepts hurt but disdains to return it. — Rabindranath Tagore

Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

There is no dignity in death in battle. Mostly that is a splashing about of human meat and fluid, and the result is filthy, but there is a great and almost sweet dignity in the sorrow, the helpless, the hopeless sorrow, that comes down over a family with the telegram. Nothing to say, nothing to do, and only one hope - I hope he didn't suffer - and what a forlorn and last-choice hope that is. — John Steinbeck

Death. I've taunted it for years with confidence and courage. It has taken years for me to realize that it wasn't courage at all, it was the complete opposite; weakness. Bad habits and vulgar sensibilities are my disease. The only cure is dignity and shame, how tragic that I seem lack both. — J.C. Wickhart

I won't live to see the death-with-dignity movement reach critical mass, but I call on you to carry it forward. — Brittany Maynard

When faced with your imminent death, the wise man reaches into the depths of his soul, grabs his sword, and does what is proper. The gods have a way of treating you like a two-penny whore on payday, but at least you might face the experience with the faintest bit of dignity. — Terry Mancour

Every woman deserves the simple dignity of dying in a bed with clean sheets and an electric light at hand.'
-spoken by Sara, the missionary doctor, during a moment of indignation. — Joe Niemczura

three things were most important in easing life's final journey. People needed strong relief from physical pain and troublesome symptoms, they needed to preserve their dignity, and they needed help with the psychological and spiritual pain of death. — Annie Clara Brown

Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took-but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you. — Michael Chabon

I said last year, and I still believe there are the votes in the House to pass Death with Dignity legislation. — Shap Smith

Life is dappled with periods of pain, and for some of us is suffused with it. Inthe course of ordinary living, the pain is mitigated by periods of peace and times of joy. In dying, however, there is only the affliction. Its brief respite and ebbs are known always to be fleeting and soon succeeded by a recurrence of the travail. The peace, and sometimes the joy, that may come occurs with the release. In this sense, there is often a serenity - sometimes even a dignity - in the act of death, but rarely in the process of dying. — Sherwin B. Nuland

There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone. — August Wilson

God is our Creator. He is loving, holy, and just. One day he will execute perfect justice against all sin. People are made in the image of God. We are beautiful and amazing creatures with dignity, worth, and value. But through our willful, sinful rebellion against God, we have turned from being his children to his enemies. Still, all people have the capacity to be in a restored loving relationship with the living God. Christ is the Son of God, whose sinless life gave him the ability to become the perfect sacrifice. Through his death on the cross, he ransomed sinful people. Christ's death paid for the sins of all who come to him in faith. Christ's resurrection from the dead is the ultimate vindication of the truth of these claims. The response God requires from us is to acknowledge our sin, repent, and believe in Christ. So we turn from sin, especially the sin of unbelief, and turn to God in faith, with the understanding that we will follow him the rest of our days. — J. Mack Stiles

With human beings, a natural death was a death with dignity. But animals were innocents, and as their stewards, people owed them mercy. — Dean Koontz

I can even see that little flourish he often does with his hand. The one that looks like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, only the rabbit is your dignity and the hat is him slowly strangling it to death in front of you. Certainly — Charlotte Stein

To live with dignity meant a premature death. — Anthony Marra

A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from his new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man's hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence - the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird's wing; and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little. His comrades look at him with large eyes thoughtfully. Moreover, they fear vaguely that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown.
("An Episode Of War") — Stephen Crane

Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven's mouth. — Aberjhani

He was revived eight times, and hanged nine.
Only after the eighth hanging were his last bits of courage and dignity gone. Only after the eight hanging did he act like a child being tortured.
For that performance, he was rewarded with what he wanted most in all this world. He was rewarded with death. He died with an erection and his feet were bare. — Kurt Vonnegut

Physical pain is not the worst thing a human has to deal with," Altman said. "Believe me, I see it every day. Not death, either. Nor even fear of death." "What is the worst, then?" "Humiliation. To be deprived of honor and dignity. To be disrobed, to be cast out by the flock. That's the worst punishment; it's akin to being buried alive. And the only consolation is that the person will perish fairly quickly." "Mm." Harry kept eye contact with Altman. "You don't have anything in that cupboard to lighten the atmosphere, — Jo Nesbo

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term "extermination camp," and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: "to lie on the bottom. — Primo Levi

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead — Frank Herbert

To each person, their own way of death - with dignity. — Susan Sarandon

Nakata had passed away calmly in his sleep, most likely not thinking of anything. His face was peaceful, with no signs of suffering, regret, or confusion. Very Nakata-like, Hoshino concluded. But what his life really meant, Hoshino had no idea. Not that anybody's life had more clear-cut meaning to it. What's really important for people, what really has dignity, is how they die. Still, how you live determines how you die. These thoughts ran through his head as he stared at the face of the dead old man. — Haruki Murakami

Today, when death and old age are increasingly concealed behind euphemisms and comforting baby talk, and life is threatened with being smothered in the mass consumption of hypnotic mechanized vulgarity, the need to confront man with the reality of his situation is greater than ever. For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions - and to laugh at it. — Martin Esslin

My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?"
"When you vomit blood,sir," Tao Chi'en said sadly.
That happened three weeks later,in the middle of Pacific,in the privacy of the captain's cabin. As soon as he could stand , the old seaman cleaned up the traces of his vomit, rinsed out his mouth , changed his bloody shirt, lighted his pipe, and went to the bow of his ship , where he stood and looked for the last time at the stars winking in a sky of black velvet. Several sailors saw him and waited at a distance, caps in hands. When he had smoked the last of his tobacco, Captain John Sommers put his legs over the rail and noiselessly dropped into the sea.
-Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende. — Isabel Allende

As for my own part I care not for death, for all men are mortal; and though I be a woman yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am indeed endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom. — Elizabeth I

The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society's, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person's humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die. — Sherwin B. Nuland

See, I don't expect to win a prize for stoic control and dignity at mourning time. Death deserve tantrums. Beating back shocked indignation, kicks in the groin, stones, classified unacceptable, not to be tolerated, not to be wooed, not to be conspired with. Only then can music, dance, movies, plays, rap be about life. Only then can life be cherished and adored. — Ruby Dee

Death has dominion because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying - the emphasis we put on dying with 'dignity' - shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we have lived it. — Ronald Dworkin

There came to him an image of man's whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man's life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man's grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night. — Thomas Wolfe

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DIGNITY AND CHOICE

By the One who set the earth with rivers pouring through in mist below the mountains, and two oceans with a strip of land between (27:61), we move the elements into various shapes without their consent, but human beings, unlike the water and trees, have a choice. They are given dignity, discernment, and the evolutionary wisdom that can move from death to new life, again to die and be restored on another level of existence. You have many choices about the ways you live and work and change and survive. Say you fall into an ocean. You may give up and sink, or you may try to swim to shore. Salvation is your decision. — Bahauddin

I was going to die.
I was going to die, right now, right here, before I even had a chance to thoroughly apologize to anyone for what I'd done ... before I had a chance to forgive myself.
I wasn't even going to leave with a bang, one final act of dignity or at least the thought that I still belonged somewhere; I would die without even the simple acceptance that I'd done everything I could.
Tears welled in my eyes, but I didn't let them fall. I didn't want to die crying. — Embee

An African who loses the ability to die with dignity is a lost man. — Henning Mankell

'Death with dignity' is our society's expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms. — Sherwin B. Nuland

With that, I hurled the slipper at him, not caring if I caused his decapitation. (I did not.) Marshaling what little dignity I yet possessed, I stomped down the corridor - challenging indeed with one shoe - and around the corner. I lay awake for hours. The prince had no right, not one, to indict me so, and if I had held the slightest hope of the book's assistance, I would have climbed at once to my wizard room for a spell with which to punish him. Death, perhaps, or humiliation. A croaking frog would be nice, particularly a frog that retained Florian's dark eyes. I should keep it in a box and poke it occasionally with a stick; that would be satisfying indeed. — Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Death is not a curse to be outwitted no matter the cost. Death is the natural pivot on which life turns, without which life as we know it could not be. A pro-life-support position is not always a pro-life position. When we can no longer hold on with purpose, to let go is to die with dignity and grace. — Forrest Church

As a business, the funeral industry has developed by selling a certain type of "dignity." Dignity is having a well-orchestrated final moment for the family, complete with a well-orchestrated corpse. Funeral directors become like directors for the stage, curating the evening's performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken, that the corpse does not interact with the audience and spoil the illusion. — Caitlin Doughty

The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings. — Anthony Powell

Ut when one human creature dies a whole world of hope and memory and feeling dies with him. To be robbed of the dignity of a natural death is a terrible deprivation. — Robertson Davies

The dignity we create in the time allotted to us becomes a continuum with the dignity we achieve by the altruism of accepting the necessity of death. — Sherwin B. Nuland

There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all - men, women and children - defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely ... When men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls. But after the liberation men had to fight in order to live ... It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one's skin. — Curzio Malaparte

I work with a group called Compassion & Choices in California. It's attempting to get death with dignity legalised in California, the idea being that so goes California, so goes the rest of the U.S., at least. — Caitlin Doughty

Religion without God; Death with dignity. — D. Michael Poppe

One area of law more than any other besmirches the constitutional vision of human dignity ... The barbaric death penalty violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its obligation to respect dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by< emulating his murderer. Capital punishment's fatal flaw is that it treats people as objects to be toyed with and discarded ... One day the Court will outlaw the death penalty. Permanently. — William J. Brennan

Yesterday was a dark day in the history of humanity, a terrible affront to human dignity. After receiving the news, I followed with intense concern the developing situation, with heartfelt prayers to the Lord. How is it possible to commit acts of such savage cruelty? The human heart has depths from which schemes of unheard-of ferocity sometimes emerge, capable of destroying in a moment the normal daily life of a people. But faith comes to our aid at these times when words seem to fail. Christ's word is the only one that can give a response to the questions which trouble our spirit. Even if the forces of darkness appear to prevail, those who believe in God know that evil and death do not have the final say. Christian hope is based on this truth; at this time our prayerful trust draws strength from it.

~General Audience, September 12, 2001. — Pope John Paul II

We are not martyrs or heroes, nor do we wish to be. We do not want to die. We are young, too young, for death. We long to see our two young sons, Michael and Robert, grown to full
manhood...We desire some day to be restored to a society where we can contribute
our energies toward building a world where all shall have peace, bread and roses.
Yes, we wish to live, but in the simple dignity that clothes only those who have been
honest with themselves and their fellow men. — Ethel Rosenberg

Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age. — Jane Addams

We have entered an Orwellian era in which entitlement replaces responsibility, coercion is described as compassion, compulsory redistribution is called sharing, race quotas substitute for diversity, and suicide is prescribed as 'death with dignity.' Political discourse has become completely corrupted. The reason is that if you tell people directly that you want to raise their taxes, transfer their wealth, count them by skin color, or let doctors kill them, most will object. Statists know this and therefore are obliged to obfuscate. — Theodore J. Forstmann

editor in New York and my mom and dad on the phone. My body is weak and bloated. I'm slowly poisoning myself to death. And it's not like I haven't seen what this shit does to people. The most fucked-up detoxes I've ever seen are the people coming off alcohol. It's worse than heroin, worse than benzos, worse than anything. Alcohol can pickle your brain - leaving you helpless, like a child - infantilized - shitting in your pants - ranting madness - disoriented - angry - terrified. But that's not gonna be me, I mean, it can't be. I may hate myself. I may fantasize about suicide. But I'm way too vain to let myself die an alcoholic death. There's nothing glamorous about alcoholism. You don't go out like Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, with a gorgeous woman riding you till your heart stops. Alcoholism takes you down slow, robbing you of every last bit of dignity on your way — Nic Sheff

The wise man looks at death with honesty, dignity and calm, recognizing that the tragedy it brings is inherent in the great gift of life. — Corliss Lamont

My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one's faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same. — Marilynne Robinson

But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect. — Huey Newton

A coward,' he declared with dignity, when he'd stopped coughing and had got his breath back, 'dies a hundred times. A brave man dies but once. But Dame Fortune favours the brave and holds the coward in contempt.'
-
Dandelion — Andrzej Sapkowski

To transport this way along bouncy mountain roads is not the way to die. Every woman deserves the simple dignity of dying in a bed with clean sheets and an electric light at hand. They wanted me to participate in a horrible abomination. I simply will not countenance the lack of respect for the poor mother of those boys. Imagine how she would feel if she woke up and saw her sons piled at her side.
-spoken by Sara to Matt regarding a victim of Amanita Phalloides [poisoning — Joe Niemczura

Death seemed to lose its terrors and to borrow a grace and dignity in sublime keeping with the life that was ebbing away. — Charles Bracelen Flood

Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife. — William Shakespeare

With respect to the death penalty, I believe that a majority of the Supreme Court will one day accept that when the state punishes with death, it denies the humanity and dignity of the victim and transgresses the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. That day will be a great day for our country, for it will be a great day for our Constitution. — William J. Brennan

I'm not Sisyphus trying to restrain death. Illyria is a soldier. If it's her time, it's her time. I'm not at war with Atropos. It's her will to take us whenever she likes. My only goal is to die with dignity. (Stryker) — Sherrilyn Kenyon