Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The pen is a formidable weapon, but a man can kill himself with it a great deal more easily than he can other people.

We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves.

Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread".

Suicide is a privilege of man which deity does not possess.

One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

What's better, I wonder - to be a toy for the humans, or to control your own destiny , even if the only way to do so is suicide?

Amid the sufferings of life on earth, suicide is God's best gift to man.

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

It became clear to the whole world that a totalitarian regime could neither accuse nor transform itself: suicide was not in its nature, it could only kill others.

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst.

The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide. We must not accept this suicide, and we must so act that it cannot take place.

And what shall he suffer who slays him who of all men, as they say, is his own best friend? I mean the suicide, who deprives himself by violence of his appointed share of life. Not because the law of the state requires him. Nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him. Nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty.

Without a belief in my programme and without an acceptance of my condition, you will ruin me, ruin yourselves and ruin the cause.

Curiosity is its own suicide.

Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness

It is related of an Englishman that he hanged himself to avoid the daily task of dressing and undressing.

I will go back to the great sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea. I will go down to her, I and no other, Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.

Lucius Arruntius killed himself, he said, to escape both the future and the past.

Lucas went even paler. “Then you’re on the track to suicide,” he whispered. “Take my advice, Valentine. Run. Run as fast as you can, for as long as you can. Steal whatever bit of life you can. You’re already dead.

Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.

There are many reasons for violence. This is just something that sometimes happens. We'd see it in treatment centers - the child who'd suffered something awful. Even in the best recovery there'd be a fear that everything would fall apart and they'd become victims again. And their final loyalty was to themselves. They couldn't be forced. They preferred to wreck everything, preferred self-destruction to surrender. (175)

I love Tris the Divergent, who makes decisions apart from faction loyalty, who isn’t some faction archetype. But the Tris who’s trying as hard as she can to destroy herself … I can’t love her.

Flattery is a foolish suicide; she destroys herself with her own hands.