Sebastian Horsley Quotes

Finding a balance between hoped for cures and respect for life: That is the challenge.

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

I believe in the sanctity of human life, from the womb to the tomb.

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.

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

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

My record as a pro-life governor is not in dispute. I am completely pro-life, and I believe that we should have a culture of life. It's informed by my faith from beginning to end. And this not just as it related to unborn babies - I did it at the end of life issues as well. This is something that goes way beyond politics.

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.

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.

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.

The traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological, and demographic developments… it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalist will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct.

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

As you know, it's so important that we always embrace the sanctity of life. One way to do that is to vote pro-life in every election.

The doctors allow one to die, the charlatans kill.

Death deserves dignity.

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

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.

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.

My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.

I believe in the right to life.

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.

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.

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.

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.

No one wants to live in a wheelchair unable to talk, only winking once for yes and twice for no. It's perfectly reasonable that there will come a point where the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.