“The very old do not succomb to disease-they implode their way into eternity. (How We Die)”

“The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.”

“The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science”

“That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me -- actually more exciting -- than such phenomena were when I was a small boy and thought them divinely (in the supernatural sense) driven.”

“Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.”

“Though biomedical science has vastly increased mankind’s average life expectancy, the maximum has not changed in verifiable recorded history.”

“My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death. ... In my professional and personal life, I have lived with the awareness of death's imminence for more than half a century, and labored in its constant presence for all but the first decade of that time.”