death
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘death’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“Life inspires more dread than death – it is life which is the great unknown.” -Emile M. Cioran
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“We were aware of the fact that death walks hand in hand with struggle.” -Stokely Carmichael
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“It is not tolerable, it is not possible, that from so much death, so much sacrifice and ruin, so much heroism, a greater and better humanity shall not emerge.” -Charles de Gaulle
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“If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.” -Ben Kingsley
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“I’m possibly a very morbid person but I think about death a lot.” -Daniel Radcliffe
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“Quarreling over food and drink, having neither scruples nor shame, not knowing right from wrong, not trying to avoid death or injury, not fearful of greater strength or of greater numbers, greedily aware only of food and drink – such is the bravery of the dog and boar.” -Xun Zi
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“I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity.” -Billy Corgan
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“Death is the great hope of all life the desire to expend itself to be used and consumed by its own longing for itself.” -Bryant H. McGill
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“I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death… I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.” -Emma Thompson
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“Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie, and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does.” -Johnny Cash
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“The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.” -Terry Pratchett
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“I’ll keep peace at all cost, even if I choke to death on my tongue.” -Paula Deen
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“It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.” -Gertrude Stein
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“Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.” -Seneca
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“Days will prove that the assassination policy will not finish the Hamas. Hamas leaders wish to be martyrs and are not scared of death. Jihad will continue and the resistance will continue until we have victory, or we will be martyrs.” -Ahmed Yassin
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“Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.” -John Milton
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“Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.” -Andre Breton
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“I have no fear of death. More important, I don’t fear life.” -Steven Seagal
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“O Death, rock me asleep, bring me to quiet rest, let pass my weary guiltless ghost out of my careful breast.” -Anne Boleyn
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“Death comes in a flash, and that’s the truth of it, the person’s gone in less than 24 frames of film.” -Martin Scorsese
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“At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.” -Ivan Illich
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“I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.” -Thomas Hardy
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“Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.” -Bertolt Brecht
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“I don’t believe in life after death. But I do believe in some grinding destiny that watches over us on earth. If I didn’t, the safety valve would give and the boiler would explode.” -Hedy Lamarr
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“Rock and menopause do not mix. It is not good, it sucks and every day I fight it to the death, or, at the very least, not let it take me over.” -Stevie Nicks
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“No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.” -Eugene Ionesco
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“The acceptance of death gives you more of a stake in life, in living life happily, as it should be lived. Living for the moment.” -Sting
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“That which is so universal as death must be a benefit.” -Friedrich Schiller
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“The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.” -Hermann Hesse
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“What is the value of sticking a microphone in a man’s face right after he has learned of his wife’s death?” -Jessica Savitch
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“I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.” -Giuseppe Garibaldi
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“I think about death a lot, like I think we all do. I don’t think of suicide as an option, but as fun. It’s an interesting idea that you can control how you go. It’s this thing that’s looming, and you can control it.” -Ryan Gosling
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“‘Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.” -Marquis de Sade
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“An insatiable appetite for glory leads to sacrifice and death, but innate instinct leads to self-preservation and life.” -Jose Marti
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“Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.” -Cat Stevens
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“For children preserve the fame of a man after his death.” -Aeschylus
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“We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.” -William Shatner
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“Death gives us sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.” -Jean Paul
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“And yet, I suppose you mourn the loss or the death of what you thought your life was, even if you find your life is better after. You mourn the future that you thought you’d planned.” -Lynn Redgrave
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“Death is the veil which those who live call life They sleep, and it is lifted.” -Percy Bysshe Shelley
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“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.” -R. D. Laing
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“Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get.” -Kevin Spacey
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“Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.” -Jerry Seinfeld
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“All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man no society will survive a shortage of women.” -Germaine Greer
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“Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.” -Havelock Ellis
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“McVeigh’s lawyer got him the death penalty, which, quite frankly, I could have done.” -Jon Stewart
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“I don’t want to get into the ‘who’s a hostage-taker’ discussion here, but what is the estate tax? It’s a double tax on death. Economists will tell you that it’s really not a tax that soaks the rich, but it’s a tax on capital that deprives business investment and therefore job creation.” -Paul Ryan
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“Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” -Vladimir Nabokov
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“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.” -W. H. Auden
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“When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.” -Brendan Behan
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“My life comes down to three moments: the death of my father, meeting my husband, and the birth of my daughter. Everything I did previous to that just doesn’t seem to add up to very much.” -Gwyneth Paltrow
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“How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.” -George MacDonald
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“I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.” -Charlotte Bronte
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“A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.” -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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“We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.” -Doug Coupland
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“Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body’s final fall, nor the barrels of death’s rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world.” -Roger Waters
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“Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear.” -Horace Mann
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“An ‘unemployed’ existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.” -Jose Ortega y Gasset
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“Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection the past then lives in your words and you are free.” -Jessamyn West
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“As far as thinking about death and murder and various ways of killing people and how people die… I probably have the most twisted mind in Slayer.” -Tom Araya
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“It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood – no more – to man, and love to a woman is life or death.” -Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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“Poor Georgia O’Keeffe. Death didn’t soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.” -Jerry Saltz
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“Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.” -Elie Wiesel
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“Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.” -Tennessee Williams
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“Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.” -Tecumseh
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“Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.” -J. K. Rowling
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“Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.” -Bill Shankly
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“Crucial to understanding federalism in modern day America is the concept of mobility, or ‘the ability to vote with your feet.’ If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol – don’t come to Texas. If you don’t like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don’t move to California.” -Rick Perry
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“It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.” -Jonathan Swift
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“Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.” -Charles Caleb Colton
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“A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death.” -Desiderius Erasmus
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“Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love.” -Dean Koontz
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“It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.” -Eric Hoffer
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“Death is not the biggest fear we have our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are.” -Miguel Angel Ruiz
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“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” -Paul McCartney
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“Take care of your life and the Lord will take care of your death.” -George Whitefield
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“Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.” -Wilson Mizner
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“I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.” -Desmond Tutu
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“No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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“Every spiritual tradition has this idea of death and resurrection. It’s not unique to Christianity.” -Deepak Chopra
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“Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.” -Jerry Garcia
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“I look at ‘Death Proof’ and realize I had too much time.” -Quentin Tarantino
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“The government is tottering. We must deal it the death blow an any cost. To delay action is the same as death.” -Vladimir Lenin
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“The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror – not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.” -David Byrne
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“My father’s death, my move, and my frightening and difficult delivery created a tremendous amount of stress, pain, and sadness for me. I was practically devastated beyond recovery.” -Brooke Shields
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“Death is really a great blessing for humanity, without it there could be no real progress. People who lived for ever would not only hamper and discourage the young, but they would themselves lack sufficient stimulus to be creative.” -Alfred Adler
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“All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.” -Isabel Allende
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“I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.” -Christopher Hitchens
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“All I want is a gentleman. I’m sick to bloody death of bastards.” -Katie Price
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“The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.” -David Herbert Lawrence
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“The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.” -Joseph Addison
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“There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.” -H. G. Wells
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“As long as you have capital punishment there is no guarantee that innocent people won’t be put to death.” -Paul Simon
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“Death is frightening, and so is Eternal Life.” -Mason Cooley
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“Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.” -William Hazlitt
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“It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.” -Simone de Beauvoir
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“If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.” -Thomas Aquinas
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“If what you do is being threatened as a profession, that could be scary. But that’s the same reason why I walked out on stage many times after receiving death threats. I couldn’t live without doing what I wanted to do. So at the same time I have to be willing to die for it.”…
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“Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can’t do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.” -Keith Richards
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“Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go.” -Jean de La Fontaine
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“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” -Leonardo DaVinci
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“To have the truth in your possession you can be found guilty, sentenced to death.” -Peter Tosh
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“Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity – in short, of tyranny – and it is committed to making tyranny universal.” -Adlai E. Stevenson
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“Death doesn’t affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn’t concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.” -W. Somerset Maugham
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“What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.” -Henry Van Dyke
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“Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.” -John Donne
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“Which death is preferably to every other? ‘The unexpected’.” -Julius Caesar
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“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.” -George Santayana
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“The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.” -Henry Miller
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“We do not celebrate the death of our enemies.” -Yitzhak Rabin
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“A country that relies on aid? Death is better than that. It stops you from achieving your potential, just as colonialism did.” -Imran Khan
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“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” -Donald Rumsfeld
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“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” -Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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“I’m Irish. I think about death all the time.” -Jack Nicholson
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“The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.” -Isaac Bashevis Singer
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“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not… with regard to abortion and euthanasia.” -Pope Benedict XVI
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“I’ve looked that old scoundrel death in the eye many times but this time I think he has me on the ropes.” -Douglas MacArthur
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“A tragedy need not have blood and death it’s enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.” -Jean Racine
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“Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.” -E. M. Forster
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“When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death – that is heroism.” -Robert Green Ingersoll
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“In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.” -Hannah Arendt
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“The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.” -Michel de Montaigne
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“Some of us can be examples about going ahead and growing, and some of us, unfortunately, don’t make it there, and end up being examples because they had to die. I hit rock bottom, but thank God my bottom wasn’t death.” -Stevie Ray Vaughan
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“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream it may be so the moment after death.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
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“Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.” -Rollo May
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“If you have only one passion in life – football – and you pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, it becomes very dangerous. When you stop doing this activity it is as though you are dying. The death of that activity is a death in itself.” -Eric Cantona
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“Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.” -James Russell Lowell
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“I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.” -Angus Young
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“Hunger, revenge, to sleep are petty foes, But only death the jealous eyes can close.” -William Wycherley
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“Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“Don’t be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it’s just death.” -Lena Horne
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“For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.” -Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
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“Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.” -Samuel Butler
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“He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.” -Horace
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“I’m one of the slowest drivers on the road. I mosey along. If you’re doing anything too fast, including living life too fast, that creates sudden death. If I have to be somewhere on time, I make sure I leave early enough.” -Anthony Hopkins
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“I am able to follow my own death step by step. Now I move softly towards the end.” -Pope John XXIII
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“If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn’t worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality. And to me, sailing the open ocean is a real challenge, because it’s life or death.” -Morgan Freeman
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“If I die a violent death, as some fear and a few are plotting, I know that the violence will be in the thought and the action of the assassins, not in my dying.” -Indira Gandhi
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“Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.” -Samuel Johnson
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“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.” -Martin Heidegger
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“Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair.” -William Cowper
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“Love has no age, no limit and no death.” -John Galsworthy
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“Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death.” -Omar N. Bradley
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“I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.” -Francis Bacon
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“If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a ‘peace conference,’ you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.” -Joseph Stalin
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“Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.” -Miyamoto Musashi
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“I like to behave in an extremely normal, wholesome manner for the most part in my daily life. Even if mentally I’m consumed with sick visions of violence, terror, sex and death.” -Courtney Love
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“Hearing nuns’ confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.” -Fulton J. Sheen
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“Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” -Rosalind Russell
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“I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.” -Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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“One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
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“Whether for life or death, do your own work well.” -John Ruskin
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“My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.” -Huey Newton
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“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.” -James Anthony Froude
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“The message that President Obama delivered in his speech at Notre Dame was: morality is immoral. Pro-life is the extremist position, not a moral position. Yet we should compromise and work to reduce abortions. Where’s the compromise between life and death – and why work to reduce the number of them occurring if there’s nothing…
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“True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.” -Stendhal
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“Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you’re free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.” -Saul Alinsky
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“When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.” -George Eliot
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“All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.” -Leo Tolstoy
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“Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.” -John Keats
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“Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.” -Thomas Merton
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“A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.” -Fidel Castro
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“Death may be the King of terrors… but Jesus is the King of kings!” -Dwight L. Moody
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“Life is but a moment, death also is but another.” -Robert H. Schuller
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“Death unites as well as separates it silences all paltry feeling.” -Honore de Balzac
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“I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.” -William Butler Yeats
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“Man is born in a day, and he dies in a day, and the thing is easily over but to have a sick heart for three-fourths of one’s lifetime is simply to have death renewed every morning and life at that price is not worth living.” -Gilbert Parker
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“I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.” -Corazon Aquino
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“Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero
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“Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.” -Arthur Schopenhauer
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