Suicide

"He That kills himself to avoid misery, fears it, And, at the best, shows but a bastard valour. This life's a fort committed to my trust, Which I must not yield up till it be forced: Nor will I. He's not valiant that dares die, But he that boldly bears calamity."

"If you like not hanging, drown yourself; Take some course for your reputation."

"Suicide is a private thing."

"Suicide kills two people. That's what it's for."

"In his famous and highly regarded book “Life After Life.” With regard to interviews he had conducted with people who had had a Near Death Experience as a result of a suicide attempt from which they either survived or were medically resuscitated, Moody writes: “These experiences were uniformly characterized as being unpleasant. As one woman said, ‘If you leave here a tormented soul, you will be a tormented soul over there, too.’ In short, they report that the conflicts they had attempted suicide to escape were still present when they died, but with added complications. In their disembodied state they were unable to do anything about their problems, and they also had to view the unfortunate consequences which resulted from their acts. A man who was despondent about the death of his wife shot himself, ‘died’ as a result, and was resuscitated. He states: ‘I didn’t go where [my wife] was, I went to an awful place. … I immediately saw the mistake I had made. … I thought, ‘I wish I hadn’t done it.’ Others who experienced this unpleasant ‘limbo’ state have remarked that they had the feeling they would be there for a long time. This was their penalty for ‘breaking the rules’ by trying to release themselves prematurely from what was, in effect, an ‘assignment’ – to fulfill a certain purpose in life.”"

"In his subsequent book “Reflections on Life After Life,” Moody says: “All of these people agree on one point: they felt their suicidal attempts solved nothing. They found that they were involved [in the other world] in exactly the same problems from which they had been trying to extricate themselves by suicide. Whatever difficulty they had been trying to get away from was still there on the other side, unresolved. One person mentioned being “trapped” in the situation which had provoked her suicide attempt. [It was] repeated again and again, as if in a cycle.”"

"Suicide is not a solution But it remains an excellent option"

"Beginning Tuesday, U.S. military veterans who find themselves in suicidal crisis will be eligible for free emergency medical care at any Department of Veterans Affairs facility or any private facility. Unlike for most other medical benefits, veterans do not have to be enrolled in the VA system to be eligible. More than 18 million veterans in the U.S. could be eligible. The new policy... will include up to 30 days of inpatient or crisis residential care and up to 90 days of follow-on outpatient care."

"I do not think life will change for the better without an assault on the establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions."

"Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death."

"The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact. ... Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks. Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation. They fail to perceive differences. Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army. When scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus the American colonialists, the French of the late eighteenth century, the Russians of 1917, the Jews of Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the North Vietnamese—any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force—are suicidal."

"My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community."

"The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night."

"A lot of writers are crazy about having people commit suicide to end their books. But people don't usually commit suicide."

"It's in our nature to kill ourselves."

"Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live."

"Consider this point carefully: nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission."

"Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition."

"No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide."

"The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark."

"Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism."

"My duty will be to continue to endeavor to do the work I seem to have been put into the world to do; and when the moment arrives at which there seems to be no rational hope of making my life useful, my duty, as I see it, will be to treat my life just as I would an aching tooth that there was no hope of making useful. I will have it out."

"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well."

"Well, I wasn't sure whether I was ever going to be able to do anything again. When we lost Tommy on December 31 of 2020, my chief of staff, Julie Tagen, who came over to the house, said that, you know, just for hours I just sat in one seat. And I was just repeating over and over, I've lost my son. My life is over. My life is over. And that pretty well captures my state of mind at the time. And he had - Speaker Pelosi, I see in hindsight, threw me a lifeline because she reached out to me. And she said, we need you. And the country needs you. So I was forced to galvanize all of my love for Tommy and my daughters, Hannah and Tabitha, and my wife, Sarah, and our family and our country, and to throw myself into the trial to make the case that Donald Trump had incited this violent insurrection and effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election."

"Some people might say, I have a right to die, when they are arguing the case for suicide. And while this is true, it is also true that the people on your planet need every bit of help and encouragement they can get from each person alive. In a certain sense, the energy of each individual does keep the world going, and to commit suicide is to refuse a basic, cooperative venture."

"We cannot tear out a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire."

"Bravest at the last, She levell'd at our purposes, and, being royal, Took her own way."

"Against self-slaughter There is a prohibition so divine That cravens my weak hand."

"To be, or not to be,—that is the question:— Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?—To die, to sleep,— No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to,—'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;— To sleep, perchance to dream:—ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,— The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns,—puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know naught of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action."

"The more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves, more than their even Christian."

"Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong; Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat: Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself."

"He that cuts off twenty years of life Cuts off so many years of fearing death."

"You ever-gentle gods, take my breath from me; Let not my worser spirit tempt me again To die before you please!"

"Suicide is often a failure of community, and claiming it as inevitable is a defense against that failure."

"To those of us who have suffered severe depression - myself included - this general unawareness of how relentlessly the disease can generate an urge to self-destruction seems widespread; the problem badly needs illumination. What is saddening about Primo Levi's death is the suspicion that his way of dying was not inevitable and that with proper care he might have been rescued from the abyss. I find it difficult not to believe that if Mr Levi had been under capable hospital attention, sequestered from the unbearable daily world in a setting where he would have been safe from his self-destructive urge, and where time would have permitted the storm raging in his brain to calm itself and die away, he would be among us now."

"One important worker task is colony defense. In some bees, ants, and wasps, the worker sting has backward-pointing barbs that lodge in an at- tacker’s flesh. The sting then detaches (“sting autotomy”) from the worker, who dies (Hermann 1984)."

"I have little use for the past and rarely think about it; however, I would briefly like to tell you how I came to be a spiritual teacher and how this book came into existence. Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else's life.... What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. “I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”... BR>When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Introduction"

"For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men’s room, but alone now, looking at my face in the mirror. At that moment of detachment from my mind, I laughed out loud....“Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.” That’s what the laughter seemed to be saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be forgotten. I would spend the next three years in anxiety and depression, completely identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awareness returned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of compulsive thinking and of the false, mindmade “I.” p. 23"

"Suicide is self-expression."

"The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week."

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

"Suicide among service members, veterans, and their families is a public health and national security crisis. In 2019 alone, the Department of Veterans Affairs reported that 6,261 veterans died by suicide. The Department of Defense reported 580 suicide deaths among Active Components, Reserve, and National Guard service members in 2020; and 202 suicide deaths among military family members in 2019.ii While suicide in the general population has been increasing, the rate among service members and veterans remains too high despite ongoing effort to reduce suicide through the implementation of federal policies, programs, and practices. For more than a decade, the suicide rates have been higher and have risen faster among veterans as compared to non-veterans. Women veterans die by suicide at almost twice the rate than nonveteran women, and veterans ages 18-34 have a suicide rate almost three times higher than nonveterans the same age."

"There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession."

"Britannia's shame! There took her gloomy flight, On wing impetuous, a black sullen soul… Less base the fear of death than fear of life. O Britain! infamous for suicide."

"It's better to burn out than to fade away."

"Another class of disembodied entities includes those whose lives on earth have been prematurely cut short, by their own act, the act of others, or by accident. Their fate in Kāmaloka depends on the conditions which surrounded their out-goings from earthly life, for not all suicides are guilty of felo de se, and the measure of responsibility may vary within very wide limits. The condition of such has been thus described:"

"Suicides, although not wholly dissevered from their...[higher] principles... to the day when they would have died a natural death, are separated from their higher principles by a gulf... whereas in cases of accidental death the higher and the lower groups actually attract each other... These, whether suicides or killed by accident, can communicate with those in earth-life, but much to their own injury... The good and innocent sleep happily till the life-period is over. But where the victim of an accident is depraved and gross, his fate is a sad one. Unhappy shades, if sinful and sensual, they wander about (not shells, for their connection with their two higher principles is not quite broken) until their death­ hour comes."

"The rule is that a person who dies a natural death will remain from “a few hours to several short years” within the earth’s attraction – i. e., the Kāmaloka. But exceptions are the cases of suicides and those who die a violent death in general. Hence, one... who was destined to live, say, eighty or ninety years – but who either killed himself or was killed by some accident, let us suppose at the age of twenty – would have to pass in the Kāmaloka not “a few years”, but in this case sixty or seventy years... Premature death brought on by vicious courses, by over-study, or by voluntary sacrifice for some great cause, will bring about delay in Kāmaloka, but the state of the disembodied entity will depend on the motive that cut short the life."

"In the victim’s case the natural hour of death was anticipated accidentally, while in that of the suicide death is brought on voluntarily and with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a fit of temporary insanity is not a felo de se, to the great grief and often trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor is he left a prey to the temptations of the Kāmaloka, but falls asleep like any other victim... The population of Kāmaloka is thus recruited with a peculiarly dangerous element by all the acts of violence, legal and illegal, which wrench the physical body from the soul and send the latter into Kāmaloka clad in the desire body, throbbing with pulses of hatred, passion, emotion, palpitating with longings for revenge, with un-satiated lusts."

"A murderer in the body is not a pleasant member of society, but a murderer suddenly expelled from the body is a far more dangerous entity; society may protect itself against the first, but in its present state of ignorance it is defenceless as against the second."