Robert Krulwich Quotes

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

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

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.

This is a precious possession which we cannot afford to tarnish, but society always is attempting to make the physician into a killer to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient ... It is the duty of society to protect the physicians from such requests.

[…] life is just the misery left between abortion and euthanasia […]

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

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.

Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been profound ethical issues confronting doctors since the birth of Western medicine, more than 2,000 years ago.

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.

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

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.

Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.

If you think of life and death on a continuum, finding the point where it tips is complicated. It cuts across all political lines and gets to the root of our humanity. It requires faith informed by years of intimacy that you're doing what's right for your loved one.

I am not prepared to explain to a sick child with cystic fibrosis, facing death and fighting for breath, the ethical grounds that hinder the science which could save him.

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

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.

The doctors allow one to die, the charlatans kill.

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

They asked me what I thought about euthanasia. I said I'm more concerned about the adults.

Make no mistake: Obamacare is a pro-death 'health' program.

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.

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.

My intent was to carry out my duty as a doctor, to end their suffering. Unfortunately, that entailed, in their cases, ending of the life.