Paul Kalanithi Quotes

There was tremendous pressure to take dialysis, and there were lots of tears when I broke the news to the family that I was not going to do it.

Why should anyone - the state, the medical profession, or anyone else - presume to tell someone else how much suffering they must endure as their life is ending?

Present law has a process to ascertain whether or not a patient is in a persistent vegetative state, and it should not matter what politicians think.

Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the 'slippery slope': once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.

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.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

A lot of money is spent trying to keep people alive who don't necessarily want to be alive.

The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled.

Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.

People make these comments all the time. They talk about this with their loved ones every day. People's feedings - tube feedings - are stopped across this country every day.

All I say about severely disabled babies is that when a life is so miserable it is not worth living, then it is permissible to give it a lethal injection. These are decisions that should be taken by parents - never the state - in consultation with their doctors.

If you explain to a patient what can be done and what might be the downsides, let the patient choose; don't have ethicists, priests, or doctors say you may or may not have replacement cells.

Yes, we need euthanasia, for certain cases where people are in comas or too immobile to even press a button.

By more than two to one Americans do not consider what Kevorkian did, injecting a terminally ill patient with legal drugs at the patient's request, to be the same as murder. You may want to note that laws are not supposed to be enforced on the basis of public opinion polls.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are never acceptable acts of mercy. They always gravely exploit the suffering and desperate, extinguishing life in the name of the 'quality of life' itself.

But we have gone so far in the direction of over treating terminal patients that we've failed to recognize when we're doing more harm than good.

Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

Human life has dignity at every age the taking of innocent human life is always wrong. I believe our nation at every level of government must reject any scheme to permit or promote assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Finding a balance between hoped for cures and respect for life: That is the challenge.

It is the duty of the doctor to prolong life. It is not his duty to prolong dying.

The proposed Health Care Reform bill will put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.

The paternalism of the medical industry is insane.

The fact that some people are not as able to communicate concerns about their care must never mean that any less attention is paid to their treatment - or their death.

I think it's ridiculous and appalling that people have to go abroad to end their life instead of being able to end their life at home.