Human Lifespan Quotes

I believe if we could enable people to live forever, we should do that. I think this is absolute.

Robert, you are just a transient. I have seen them come and I have seen them go and I’ll be here long after you have gone.

No man should live longer than his teeth.

The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.

I am confident that when I get really old, the human lifespan will be extended.

What I'm after is not living to 1,000. I'm after letting people avoid death for as long as they want to.

One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?

Human lifespan used to be 30 years, 25 years. But there's no basic, fundamental reason why it has to be short.

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

It's not beyond the possibility that there still could be a YES in 200 years' time... of course with different members, unless the medical profession comes up with something extraordinary.

Most of us believe that we are morally bound to live as long as we can and to help our neighbors do the same.

Time is what death needs to grow people in.

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

History uses a unit of measure for time that is different from that of the lifespan of the individual, whereas man is only too ready to measure the evolution of history by his own yardstick.

We would all be incredibly boring to a vampire who is 400, 500 years old.

Nothing is swifter than our years.

Men die. It's practically what they're for.

One of the things that got me on this topic for this book was that when I was researching the column I wrote in 2009 saying that I was stepping down from my column at "Newsweek" because I wanted to make room for newer, fresh voices out there, I discovered that in the year I was born, 1952, the average life expectancy of an American was 68. I was shocked by that figure and every time I mention it I hear a gasp from somebody in the crowd. Now, of course, we're more or less at 80, so that means that we've gotten 12 additional years.

Planned obsolescence is not really a new concept. God used it with people.

There will come an age when our average life expectancy will reach 200 years.

Just do the math. In the next 50 to 75 years, people will be living to be 130 and 140. They'll be working until they're 100. It's incredible.

As far as I'm concerned, ageing is humanity's worst problem, by some serious distance.

[Anti-aging therapies will] never be perfect, but we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of before we have any 200-year-olds, and the same for 300 and 400 and so on.

What makes me so certain that the natural human lifespan is far in excess of the actual one is this. Among all my autopsies (and I have performed over 1000), I have never seen a person who died of old age. In fact, I do not think that anyone has ever died of old age yet. We invariably die because one vital part has worn out too early in proportion to the rest of the body.

We all die, just a question of when.