Life and Death Decisions Quotes

When a president makes life and death decisions, he should draw strength and wisdom from broad and deep experience with the reasons for and the risks of committing our children to our defense. For no matter how many others are involved in the decision, the president is a lonely man in a dark room when the casualty reports come in.

Unlike other professions - doctor, lawyer, teacher, journalist, sales clerk, stock broker - when a cop makes a bad mistake, it could mean someone is dead. They take home mental baggage unlike anything carried in almost every other job.

I suddenly realized at the CIA that I had to make life-and-death decisions about people.

Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he'd just laugh.

"You die, I die too.” Tobias looks over his shoulder at me. “I asked you not to do this. You made your decision. These are the repercussions."

I think life is too sacred to ever take it in any circumstances, even for the cure of a disease or something like that.

We don't let a car company just throw out a car and start driving it around without checking that the wheels are fastened on. We know that would result in death; but for some reason we have no hesitation at throwing out some algorithms untested and unmonitored even when they're making very important life-and-death decisions.

I do everything in this life-or-death way.

The worst of all worlds is to have some individual deciding who lives and who dies.

A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.

You can't go wrong with major life and death stories when it comes to a competition, so I thought I'd have a go at writing one.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

I want to know how these very people who are against war because of loss of life can possibly be the same people who are for abortion? They are the same people who are for animal rights, but they are not for the rights of the unborn.

I don’t trust the government to decide who lives and who dies.

A point concerning property, which ought, for the reasons I have just mentioned, to be most speedily decided, frequently exercises the wit of successions of lawyers, for many generations .… But the question concerning a man’s life, that great question in which no delay ought to be counted tedious, is commonly determined in twenty-four hours at the utmost. It is not to be wondered at that injustice and absurdity should be inseparable companions.

It is very distressing that anyone would look at these matters from a political viewpoint. Core beliefs about when life begins and ends are far too important for any such calculations.