Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 46.
In some nations like Holland medically assisted suicide us not only legal but is considered a moral course of action. In other nations it is illegal, but most individual physicians will assist a dying patient in terrible pain by increasing the dosage of pain killers which relives pain but also speeds death. In the US the individual states have different laws and rules. What can be a humanitarian action in one state, can be a felony in another. That is what happened to Kervorkian who served a long prison sentence for doing what the family and deceased begged him to do and would be legal and moral in another state.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, writer, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.
