Richard Lamm Quotes

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

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.

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.

I know that there are people who believe that if they get to the stage where life is absolutely intolerable because of pain and indignity... they would like to end their life before nature intended, and we think they should have the choice to do so.

People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.

Incurably sick persons should be granted mercy death.

I think a lot of us share a fear that we and people we love will lose control of our own destinies at the end of life.

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

In the event that my illness worsens, I want to have a guarantee that I can die in a dignified manner. Nowhere in the bible does it say that a person has to stick it out to the decreed end. No one tells us what "decreed" means.

Soon you won't even have the choice to live or die as you wish!

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.

Make no mistake: Obamacare is a pro-death 'health' program.

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.

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

I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution.

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

These end of life decisions are so difficult and so personal that government ought to stay out of it.

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

Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long smooth-sounding words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless..

I've always said when age or infirmity gets the better of me, I'm off to whichever civilised country lets the elderly die with dignity.

I think it's ridiculous and appalling that people have to go abroad to end their life instead of being able to end their life at home.

The right to a good death is a basic human freedom. The [2006-JAN] Supreme Court's decision to uphold aid in dying allows us to view and act on death as a dignified moral and godly choice for those suffering with terminal illnesses.

The right to choose death when life no longer holds meaning is not only the next liberation but the last human right.

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.