Phyllis Bottome Quotes

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'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.

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.

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.

When does life start? When does it end? Who makes these decisions?... Every day, in hospitals and homes and hospices... people are struggling with those profound issues.

I hope that when the time comes, I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life's journey in the manner of my choice.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Congress called a special session to debate the treatment of a woman in a persistent vegetative state on a day that 20,000 children died in the third world.

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.

It's just awful to see her like this. There comes a point when euthanasia is kinder than the alternative, and I think we reached that juncture some time ago.

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

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.

Before operating on a patient's brain... I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.

The American Medical Association says the humane way is to let people starve and thirst to death. If you did that to an animal, youd be put in jail immediately ... In the face of such insanity masquerading as authority, who wouldnt be strident?

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.