Johnny Isakson Quotes

I think a lot of us share a fear that we and people we love will lose control of our own destinies at the end of life.

Have a living will if you don't want long-term life support. It makes the decision easier for the family.

Have a conversation with your family about your end-of-life wishes while you are healthy. No one wants to have that discussion... but if you do, you'll be giving your loved ones a tremendous gift, since they won't have to guess what your wishes would have been, and it takes the onus of responsibility off of them.

You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family.

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.

Make a living will. Talk about it. Death is going to happen to everybody. Write it down. Even if you write it on a piece of paper at home and have your family witness it, you need to write it down.

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

Shortly after her feeding tube is removed, Terri Schiavo receives the Catholic ceremony of last rites. Michael Schiavo stays in a room down the hall. He remains at his wife's side throughout the day, except when her immediate family comes to see Terri.

When people are dying, bureaucracy should be thrown out of the water.

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.

The tragic case of Terri Schiavo in Florida highlights the importance of making our health-care wishes known.

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

The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn't going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We're torn about these things.

Estate planning is an important and everlasting gift you can give your family. And setting up a smooth inheritance isn't as hard as you might think.

Happiness, true happiness, is an inner quality. It is a state of mind. If your mind is at peace, you are happy. If your mind is at peace, but you have nothing else, you can be happy. If you have everything the world can give - pleasure, possessions, power - but lack peace of mind, you can never be happy.

I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution.

If I ever went, I'd want to go peacefully in my sleep. I wouldn't want to plan my own death.

As most of the population suffers through life, barely surviving, disappointed and confused day after day, hopeless, wondering what happened to their strong and beautiful country, it is in the media's power to restore, if not some of our quality of life, at least a bit of our peace of mind.

As a free person, I ought to be allowed if I'm dying to take something.

The end of life is likely to be an important focus for innovation. Most people die in hospitals, tied up with tubes and with their bodies pumped full of drugs. Yet most would rather die at home and with more control over the timing and manner of their death.

People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.

Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject.

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.

Most of the debate over the cultures of death and life is about process. The debate focuses on the technology available to determine how we prolong life and how and when we end it.