Death Wish Quotes

• Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.

  Mario Puzo

  Real, Tragedy, Wish

  1978 Fools Die, ch.55.

  56 Copy quote

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• What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.

  Mario Puzo

  Real, Stupid, Thinking

  58 Copy quote

• The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

  Hannah Arendt

  Death, War, Simple

  Hannah Arendt (1970). “On violence”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  55 Copy quote

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• Love, whose month is ever May,
  Spied a blossom passing fair,
  Playing in the wanton air:
  Through the velvet leaves the wind,
  All unseen can passage find;
  That the lover, sick to death,
  Wish'd himself the heaven's breath.

  William Shakespeare

  Air, Wind, Sick

  William Shakespeare, John Payne Collier (1847). “Shakespeare's Plays: With His Life”

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• You got a death wish, Truant?' Which was the thing that scared me. 'Cause maybe I did.

  Mark Z. Danielewski

  Wish, Causes, Scared

  4 Copy quote

• Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.

  Audre Lorde

  Forgiveness, Hatred, Wish

  4 Copy quote

• However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Healing, Silence, Injustice

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007). “Infidel”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

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• Do you have a death wish?" he asked. Will grinned at him. I'm just relying on your judgment," he replied. "I can't keep track of everything in my head.

  John Flanagan

  Track, Wish, Judgment

  5 Copy quote

• I know I've got a death wish. I've never enjoyed my life, I've never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be.

  Anna Kavan

  People, Wish, Mountain

  12 Copy quote

• There is a thing called the death wish, a literal thing. It doesn't mean you want to die. It just means however we're built, as we get into these years, some inner part of you does begin to accept the fact that you're heading towards the end, and there's a peace that comes with that.

  Frank Langella

  Mean, Years, Wish

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Death, Heart, Ties

  6 Copy quote

• My adolescence progressed normally: enough misery to keep the death wish my usual state, an occasional high to keep me from actually taking the gas-pipe.

  Faye Moskowitz

  Inspirational, Teenage, Wish

  Faye Moskowitz (2011). “And the Bridge Is Love”, p.57, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  People, Silence, Wish

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2008). “Infidel”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.

  Bill Mollison

  Thinking, Wish, Want

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  4 Copy quote

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• Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite.

  Huey Newton

  Suicide, Mean, Opposites

  Huey P. Newton (2009). “Revolutionary Suicide: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.20, Penguin

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• The giant superstars are people whose talent is so enormous that their death wish can't destroy it.

  Bob Newhart

  People, Wish, Giants

  "Bob Newhart: What I've Learned" by Mike Sager, www.esquire.com. December 18, 2008.

  5 Copy quote

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• To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

  Don DeLillo

  Football, Thinking, Past

  "Director’s Cut: Q&A With Don DeLillo". Interview with by Rafe Bartholomew, grantland.com. October 12, 2011.

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• The liberals' present furor over the CIA's covert operations against al-Qaida suggests that they harbor a death wish not only for themselves but also for the whole country.

  Bob Tyrrell

  Country, Wish, Als

  4 Copy quote

• This life in us; however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened; To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish; Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Men, Flames, Pro Life

  Malcolm Muggeridge (1971). “Something beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta”, HarperCollins

  38 Copy quote

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• Destroy everything. That's all well and fine, but you got to offer something in it's place. Since I always have a point and purpose to what I do, thats why people accuse me of being calculated. it's the way I am. I always know my next move. I could never conjure up a death wish, this is all I have is life. I don't know what comes next, and frankly I'm in no rush to find out. I don't believe in playing a martyr just for the sheer hell of it. And for something as chidish as Rock 'N' Roll is not on.

  John Lydon

  Believe, Moving, Rocks

  12 Copy quote

• Beggars can't be choosers. We don't have all the money in the world. So anyone who wants to be in the band and be broke - that's their own death wish.

  Cass McCombs

  Wish, World, Broke

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Johnny Ringo to me was just the best antagonist that I've ever played, because I played him as a guy who has a death wish and had done everything that he wanted in life. As far as he was concerned, a gun fight was about as exciting as it was going to get.

  Michael Biehn

  Fighting, Gun, Guy

  16 Copy quote

• I believe-and human psychologists, particularly psychoanalysts should test this-that present-day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive. It is more than probable that the evil effects of the human aggressive drives, explained by Sigmund Freud as the results of a special death wish, simply derive from the fact that in prehistoric times intra-specific selection bred into man a measure of aggression drive for which in the social order today he finds no adequate outlet.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Believe, Men, Order

  KONRAD LORENZ (1963). “ON AGRESSION”

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• Jesus, you've got a death wish." "Right now I have a bathroom-and-sleep-somewhere safe wish, kid.

  Lilith Saintcrow

  Jesus, Sleep, Kids

  "Strange Angels". Book by Lilith Saintcrow, 2009.

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• During the war, there were people wishing me death, wishing my son death, wishing my wife death in very graphic ways. In the past, I would go overseas and I would say, "Israel is like my family: we disagree, but we're all brothers." I can't say that anymore, because life proves me wrong.

  Etgar Keret

  Brother, War, Son

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

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