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Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live and take comfort. Thou has left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee. Thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. William Wordsworth, Toussaint L’Ouverture 1807
The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
But to the socket. William Wordsworth, The Excursion
God is dead. Friedrich Nietzsche
cf.
Nietzsche is dead. GOD Anon, 29th March 2003
We’re all dead. Fawlty Towers s1e2: The Builders, Basil to Polly, BBC 1975
A man can have but one life and one death,
One heaven, one hell. Robert Browning, In a Balcony
The dead govern the living. Auguste Comte
We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction. R D Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. Carl Sagan, In the Valley of the Shadow, cited Parade magazine 10 March 1996; viz Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium p245, 1997
The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
Religion denies death is real. Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life II, Channel 4 2012
Intuition rebels: we seem to want to believe that there’s some essence of ourselves: something that would not go across with all those molecules, something that a religious person might want to call a soul.
It’s so hard to shake off the religious way of death. We are programmed to believe in something like a soul.
Religion still dominates our thinking about death. ibid.
However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker 1986 ch1
The essence of life is statistically improbability on a colossal scale. ibid. ch11
Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there’s nothing to be afraid of, I won’t know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn’t something to be afraid of, it’s something to be terrified of. Christopher Hitchens
Those of who merely face oblivion have less to fear. Richard Dawkins, interview Adam Boulton, Sky News 2008
Religion is a real danger to the survival of civilisation ... It will be the death of us all. Christopher Hitchens v Tony Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? Debate 2010
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. Mark Twain, attributed & unsourced, cited Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. Matthew Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum, 1853
Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck. George Carlin
Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time. George Carlin
So, have a little fun. Soon enough you’ll be dead and burning in Hell with the rest of your family. George Carlin, Brain Droppings