Dan Rather Quotes

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.

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.

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

The choice of euthanasia becomes more serious when it takes the form of a murder committed by others on a person who has in no way requested it and who has never consented to it. The height of arbitrariness and injustice is reached when certain people, such as physicians or legislators, arrogate to themselves the power to decide who ought to live and who ought to die.

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.

Death is not treatment, even if it's medically facilitated.

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

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.

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.

My aim in helping the patient was not to cause death. My aim was to end suffering. It's got to be decriminalized.

Would you require a wretched being, whose life is slowly wasting under a lingering disease, to despatch himself at once by the stroke of a dagger? Does not the very disorder which consumes his strength deprive him of the courage to effect his deliverance?

Euthanasia" is an excellent and comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.

The Dutch practice euthanasia so briskly that they will kill themselves even before the Islamists get around to it.

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.

I suppose, if helping a patient die is killing, I suppose I'm a killer.

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.

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.

We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

If I had terminal cancer, I had a few weeks to live, I was in tremendous amount of pain - if they just effectively wanted to turn off the switch and legalise that by legalising euthanasia, I'd want that.

There can be no stronger claim to a physician's assistance than at the time when death is imminent, a moral judgment implied by the state's own recognition of the legitimacy of medical procedures necessarily hastening the moment of impending death.

By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life.

Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.

Nineteen percent of doctors say that they'd be able to give their patients a lethal injection. But they also went on to say that the patient would have to be really, really behind on payments.