#er

You want these back, don't you? You want me out of here so you can come back and take over where you left off. I don't blame you. It's your body and your brain-and your life, even though you weren't able to make much use of it. I don't have the right to take it away from you. Nobody does. Who's to say that my light is better than your darkness? Who's to say death is better than your darkness? Who am I to say?... ↗

— Daniel Keyes

#flowers-for-algernon #death

A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#doctors #health #death

The unlimited creativity of humanity has created cruelty so chilling that death itself has become a welcomed and kind benefactor. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#cause-and-effect #generations #death

The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#les-miserables #death

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention. ↗

— Clay Shirky

#entertainment #popculture #communication

But death we are, and death we've always been. ↗

— Anne Rice

#interview-with-the-vampire #vampire-chronicles #death

Kernel grins. “To the death, Master Grady?” “To the death, Master Fleck,” I grin back. Then we both say together, “But not ours! ↗

— Darren Shan

#kernel-fleck #death

Is this your first case?' This from the ugliest person Winter had ever seen. His face resembled five pounds of meat loaf molded by an arthritic potter. ↗

— Åke Edwardson

#scandinavian-literature #death

Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil! Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business. ↗

— Aristophanes

#feminism #gender-roles #greek-literature #pacifism #war

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it's not the result of venal bureaucrats. (1994) p. 99 ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#bureaucrats #conservative #corruption #government #plato