Death Dignity Quotes

the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference

Death deserves dignity.

Well, let's take what people think is a dignified death. Christ - was that a dignified death? Do you think it's dignified to hang from wood with nails through your hands and feet bleeding, hang for three or four days slowly dying, with people jabbing spears into your side, and people jeering you? Do you think that's dignified? Not by a long shot. Had Christ died in my van with people around Him who loved Him, the way it was, it would be far more dignified. In my rusty van.

Everybody dies, Sally. The thing is to die well.

To each person, their own way of death - with dignity.

Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.

Corpses are more fit to be thrown out than is dung.

I pray that politicians, lawmakers and religious leaders have the courage to support the choices terminally ill citizens make in departing Mother Earth with dignity and love.

If you must commit suicide ... always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of.

A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.

There's a sort of decency among the dead, a remarkable discretion: you never find them making any complaint against the doctor who killed them!

It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.

And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.

I don't want a lot of strangers looking down at my wrinkles and my big fat belly when I'm dead.

The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.

Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.

I have not seen much dignity in the process by which we die. The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail.

'Death with dignity' is our society's expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms.

Would you rather die, or be unwound? Now he finally knows the answer. Maybe this is what he wanted. Maybe it's why he stood there and taunted Roland. Because he'd rather be killed with a furious hand than dismembered with cool indifference.

The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.

Can't you at least die with a little dignity?

We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.