Desmond Tutu Quotes

Death deserves dignity.

I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician's role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient's wishes.

I've always said when age or infirmity gets the better of me, I'm off to whichever civilised country lets the elderly die with dignity.

No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who've already gone.

In the event that my illness worsens, I want to have a guarantee that I can die in a dignified manner. Nowhere in the bible does it say that a person has to stick it out to the decreed end. No one tells us what "decreed" means.

Whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse.

Many, if not most, Americans can imagine a fate worse than death, and it is a seemingly interminable process of dying. For them, it is frightening that politicians can find ways to interject themselves into this sad process.

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

I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.

Soon you won't even have the choice to live or die as you wish!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Wait for them to die

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

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.

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.

The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

Euthanasia ... is simply to be able to die with dignity at a moment when life is devoid of it.