Margaret Mead Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have been profound ethical issues confronting doctors since the birth of Western medicine, more than 2,000 years ago.

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.

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

Nineteen percent of doctors say that they'd be able to give their patients a lethal injection. But they also went on to say that the patient would have to be really, really behind on payments.

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

It is the duty of the doctor to prolong life. It is not his duty to prolong dying.

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.

My aim in helping the patient was not to cause death. My aim was to end suffering. It's got to be decriminalized.

We're going to use Terri Schiavo later on. This is going to be an issue in 2006 and it's going to be an issue in 2008, because we're going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, "Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not, or is that going to be up to your loved ones?

I suppose, if helping a patient die is killing, I suppose I'm a killer.

They asked me what I thought about euthanasia. I said I'm more concerned about the adults.

We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.

Almost everybody accepts that some people can be killed. 'The concept of 'brain death' - the belief that people on respirators can legitimately be killed - shows that.

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

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.

By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life.

My intent was to carry out my duty as a doctor, to end their suffering. Unfortunately, that entailed, in their cases, ending of the life.

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.

People make these comments all the time. They talk about this with their loved ones every day. People's feedings - tube feedings - are stopped across this country every day.