We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.
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The Germans are the most philosophic people in the world, and the greatest smokers: now I trace their philosophy to their smoking. Smoking has a sedative effect upon the nerves, and enables a man to bear the sorrows of this life (of which every one has his share) not only decently, but dignifiedly.
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In point of fact, I am the very opposite of an anthropomorphiser. I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals.
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If a child shows himself to be incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity marry, and perpetuate his kind.
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'For fidelity, devotion, love, many a two-legged animal is below the dog and the horse. Happy would it be for thousands of people if they could stand at last before the Judgment Seat and say 'I have loved as truly and I have lived as decently as my dog.' And yet we call them 'only brutes'!'
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The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
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Oh! that's in course—I do love him; why wouldn't I? for he has a nice little room all decently furnished for any young woman to go into—be...
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The Courage that we all prize and seek is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
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