death

Thursday 28th of March 2024

By the numbers [T]he odds of being killed by an immigrant terrorist of any kind, let alone a Muslim immigrant, are one in 3.6 million. Vox.com, October 27, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Aging Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old man escapes those “cold gradations of decay” so distressing to himself and to his friends. William Osler, The Principles and Practice of Medicine © 2018 Kwiple.com
Aging Right now, we live well, and then we don't live well, and then we die. The most that science seems to offer us is this: We'll live well, and then we'll die. Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, May 13, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Aging Who wants to live to be a hundred? A guy who's ninety-nine. old joke © 2018 Kwiple.com
American Dream Dying at home © 2018 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Factor by which more Americans died in school shootings than in combat last year: 3 Harper's Index, August 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
By the numbers More than 25% of gun homcides in 2015 happened across census blocks that contain just 1.5% of the country's total population. While gun control advocates often say it is unacceptable that Americans overall are “25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries”, people who live in these neighborhood areas face an average gun homicide rate about 400 times higher than the rate across those high-income countries. The Guardian, November 15, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Number of countries worldwide with maternal death rates lower than that of the United States: 76 Harper's Index, August 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Number of the ten leading causes of death in the United States whose fatality rate increased in 2015: 8 Harper's Index, March 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the United States and Nicaragua.  Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land  © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers One dead in Putney equals 10 dead in Paris equals 100 dead in Turkey equals 1,000 dead in India equals 10,000 dead in China Saying among British journalists about what it takes to be front-page news © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Outdoor air pollution contributes to the deaths of an estimated 1.6 million people in China every year, or about 4,400 people a day … New York Times, August 14, 2015, based on a report by Berkeley Earth, a California-based research organization © 2015 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Ratio of the average annual number of deaths in the United States caused by drowning to those caused by gun violence: 1:8 Of federal research funding for drowning to funding for gun violence: 1:1 Harper's Index, April 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Car culture Analysis from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has shown that pedestrians who are hit by pickups or S.U.V.s are two to three times more likely to die than those who are hit by cars. In fact, the number of pedestrians killed by vehicles rose forty-six per cent between 2010 and 2019. John Seabrook, The New Yorker, January 24, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Car culture As American cars have bulked up,  the number of fatalities for the drivers and  passengers inside these rolling fortresses has fallen by 22 per cent. But the number of pedestrians killed has risen by 57 per cent. John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, February 23, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Cocks of the walk Then there is Jerome Rodale, founder of the publishing empire devoted to health. In 1971, Dick Cavett invited Mr. Rodale onto his TV show after reading a New York Times Magazine article that called him “the guru of the organic food cult.” Mr. Rodale, 72, took his chair next to Mr. Cavett, proclaimed that he would live to be 100, and then made a snoring sound and died. (The episode never aired.) Pagan Kennedy, New York Times, March 9, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus Just between June and November [2021], 163,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US alone could have been prevented by vaccination, estimates the Kaiser Family Foundation.  That’s nearly double all the American deaths in war in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined — and the unvaccinated continue to die, pointlessly. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, January 13, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally. They can't. If we had a Wall, they wouldn't even try! Donald Trump, 10:30 AM - 29 Dec 2018 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say Over 70% of Americans who died with COVID, died on Medicare, and some people want #MedicareForAll ? Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), 1:00 AM – Feb 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say This is the price of freedom. Bill O'Reilly, commenting on the 58 murdered and nearly 500 injured by a gun nut in Las Vegas  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Death After World War II, law and the churches supported the doctors in the medicalisation of death. … Agony came to be seen as the effort of a medical team, and death as the team's frustration by an ultimate act of consumer resistance. Ivan Illich, “Death Undefeated” © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death  Cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people. Sign on Henry Rosovsky's desk [Often attributed to Vartan Gregorian, who quoted it in his memoir, The Road to Home ] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Death Covid-19 has left the same proportion of the population dead — about 0.3% — as did World War II, and in less time. One study, published in the scientific journal PLOS One last September estimates that roughly 7.4 million years of life were lost in the U.S. in 2020 alone, with 73% of them attributable directly to Covid-19. There are fears these losses will be forgotten on a broad scale, beyond those directly affected. Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Death The dead don't die. They live on and help. D. H. Lawrence © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death Death has has got something to be said for it: There's no need to get out of bed for it; Wherever you may be, They bring it to you, free. Kingsley Amis, “Delivery Guaranteed” © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war. Donald Rumsfeld © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death Death is not the end. There remains litigation over the estate. Ambrose Bierce © 2015 Kwiple.com
Death Falling life expectancy is the last thing you would expect on a worry list about US national security. Yet when it is dropping as fast as it is in the US — Americans live almost five years less than the wealthy country average — even the Pentagon has to sit up. At 76, Americans now live shorter lives than their peers in China and only a year  longer than the citizens of supposedly benighted Mexico. People in Japan, Italy and Spain, on the other hand, can expect to live to around 84. Your people’s longevity is the ultimate test of a system’s ability to deliver. Yet neither Democrats nor Republicans, presidents or legislators, seem too bothered. Edward Luce, Financial Times, September 8, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Death Farmer Bill Dies In House headline, Atlanta Constitution, April 13, 1978 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death Gee, I hope this works. Fred Chamberlain's last words before being frozen in the hope that someday he can be thawed and revived. Quoted in National Geographic, April 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death Q: A:  How would you like to die? Surrounded by enemies, holding a grenade. Bill Maher, Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, May, 2010  © 2015 Kwiple.com
Death I miss my mother and father and grandfather. That feeling continues for all time, even at 100. Most people do. Captain Tom Moore, the 100-year old Briton knighted for raising more than £33m for Britain's National Health Service by walking laps in his garden  © 2020 Kwiple.com
Death I pray — for word is out And prayer comes round again — That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man. William Butler Yeats, “A Prayer For Old Age”  © 2015 Kwiple.com
Death If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier” © 2015 Kwiple.com
Death If I were to shoot you on either side of your heart, one shot . . . and then another, you'd have two punctured lungs, two sucking chest wounds. Now you'e good and fucked. But you'll still be alive long enough to feel your lungs fill up with blood. If I shoot you there with the shots coming fast, it's no problem. The ripples tear up your heart and lungs and you don't do the death rattle, you just die. There's shock, but no pain. Phil Klay, “Redeployment” © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death In our atomized world, death is far more shocking for us because we cannot imagine anything beyond this self, this life. Seamus O'Mahony, The Way We Die Now © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death It was possible to insist on the corruption of the dead body, and the dishonour of its begetting, while there was a living belief in the incorruption and the glory of the immortal part. But in England, at any rate, the belief in the future life as taught in Christian doctrine, is very uncommon today even in the minority who make church-going or prayer a consistent part of their lives; and without some such belief natural death and physical decomposition have become too horrible to contemplate or to discuss. Geoffrey Gorer, “The Pornography of Death” © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death Lfie is a hospice, never a hospital. Alain de Botton, New York Times, March 19, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Death The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth” © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death More than 1m people around the world die each year from infections linked to microbes resistant to antibiotics, according to a study that estimates the scale of a "silent pandemic" that is now more deadly than malaria or HIV. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been described by experts as one of the greatest  threats to public health in the 21st century. The figures underscore the dangers of bacteria developing resistance to existing antibiotics as a result of overuse — including during the Covid-19 pandemic — against a backdrop of scant new vaccines and drugs under development to prevent or treat infections. Financial Times, January 19, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Death Mortality rates in recent years have been increasing for all whites, in contrast to decreases in the rest of the world. At the same time, it is worth noting that mortality rates for African Americans remain higher than for whites. Adverse economics is bad for health, regardless of race. Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits © 2019 Kwiple.com
Death ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens  headline, The Onion, February 14, 2018, following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. attributed to Joseph Stalin © 2019 Kwiple.com
Death One of the biggest worldwide public health triumphs in recent years has been maternal mortality. Global death rates fell by more than a third from 2000 to 2015. The United States, however, is one of the few countries in the world that have gone against the grain, new data show. Its maternal mortality rate has risen despite improvements in health care and an overwhelming global trend in the other direction. New York Times, September 22, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death Our problem with death is that, compared to our ancestors, we live so long. Seamus O'Mahony, The Way We Die Now © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death Ralph, you're probably going to get killed, so it's best to accept it. You'll get along much better. Curtis LeMay, to a pilot who confessed fears about LeMay's plan for low-level firebombing attacks on Tokyo without knowing about Japan's air defenses © 2021 Kwiple.com
Death A recent survey carried out on behalf of the Department of Health found that 74 per cent of 49,000 people surveyed believed that the right place for a person to die was a hospital. Yet only 3 percent of these respondents stated that the dying person him- or herself would want to die in such a setting. Bluntly stated: hospital and hospice deaths are considerably more convenient for the family than they are for the person. Joanna Bourke, Prospect, April 2018 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death Since last month the military has been using “ceremonial buglers” at some military funerals—a tape that can be inserted into a bugel and sounds like the real thing. “We've got 1,800 veterans dying each day, and only 500 buglers,”  said Lieutenant Coloned Cynthia Colin, a defense department spokeswoman. “We needed to do something to fill the void.” Gary Younge, November 7, 2003 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Death TAG GOES HERE Text on the tattoo of an arrow pointing to the big toe on a soldier's foot Described by Matt Taibbi in “Fort Apache, Iraq” © 2017 Kwiple.com
Death There will be no returns. Ludwig Wittgenstein, to a friend who congratulated him on his 62nd birthday by saying “Many happy returns” days before dying of cancer, as he knew he would © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. … The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will live forever in its collective memory. Yet this premise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not know what to make of it. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death  The vanity and presumption of governing  beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man  © 2020 Kwiple.com
Death Venki Ramakrishnan, former president of the Royal Society and a chemistry Nobel laureate, nurses a more fundamental objection to killing off death. While bacteria and cancer cells are in effect immortal, he explained in an interview recently, whole organisms are not. All animals die, suggesting that death co-evolved with sex: “[Reproduction] is like a lottery. You're tossing different combinations of genes out at life to see which one can do better but, in order to give them a shot, the older generation has to get out of the way.” Death, in other words, is the price we pay for sex. Financial Times, October 29, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Death The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilious, Letter 70 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death Woman Found Dead in Trunk Kept to Herself, Neighbors Say headline, New York Times, October 28, 2002 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Death You have to die from something. Ben Carson, when asked about being a doctor who eats fried chicken © 2015 Kwiple.com
A death in the family For the most part, in ways both oblique and and direct, the emphasis was on my grandfather's material success, his “killer” instinct, and his talent for saving a buck. Donald was the only one  to deviate from the script. In a cringe-inducing turn, his eulogy de- volved into a paean to his own greatness. It was so embarrassing that Maryanne [Trump's older sister] later told her son not to allow any of her siblings to speak at her funeral. Mary Trump, recalling the eulogy Donald Trump delivered at his father's funeral © 2020 Kwiple.com
Death threats In a world where the president goes on Twitter to call a woman “horseface” it seems pointless to call for “civility.” So let me suggest that we start with a lower bar, maybe one we could still hope to achieve: Let's stop threatening to kill one another. Bill McKibben, recipient of many death threats, New York Times, October 21, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
< Death threats One email, sent on Jan. 2 to officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.” Reuters, June 11, 2021, in an article about Georgia entitled: “Trump-inspired death threats are terrorizing election workers” © 2021 Kwiple.com
Death threats A society in which critics fear death is a society with fewer critics, and hence with fewer chances for change.  Bill McKibben, New York Times, October 21, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
< Death threats “You actually deserve to hang by your goddamn, soy boy, skinny-ass neck,” said a woman in one voicemail, to Richard Barron, director of elections for Fulton County, GA. Reuters, June 11, 2021, in an article about Georgia entitled: “Trump-inspired death threats are terrorizing election workers” © 2021 Kwiple.com
Death with dignity Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. … They say he gave them but two words. “More weight,” he says. And died. Elizabeth Proctor, about Giles Corey, who was “pressed” to death for refusing to plead “aye or nay” to the charge of witchcraft, in Arthur Miller's The Crucible © 2016 Kwiple.com
Deaths of despair These trends among less educated Americans — declines in wages, the quality and number of jobs, marriage, and community life — are central in instilling despair, spurring suicide and other self-inflicted harms, such as alcohol and drug abuse. The real roots of the epidemic lie in the long-term malaise that began around 1970, when economic growth in the United States slowed, inequality began to rise, younger workers realized that they would never do as well as their parents had done, and those without high-level skills fell further behind. Anne Case and Angus Deaton © 2021 Kwiple.com
Deaths of despair The U.S. suicide rate has risen by a third since 1999; there are now more suicides than deaths on the roads each year, and there are two and a half times as many suicides as murders. In 2017 alone, there were 158,000 deaths of despair [deaths from suicide, drug overdoses and alchoholic liver disease], the equivalent of three fully loaded Boeing 737 MAX jets falling from the sky every day for a year. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Drugs I'll die young, but it's like kissing God. Lenny Bruce on his heroin addiction © 2021 Kwiple.com
Facebook Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook vice president, in a memo leaked to the press, which caused many employees to begin a witch-hunt to find and punish the leaker and to delete potentially controversial comments or newsworthy messages © 2018 Kwiple.com
Facts Birth, and copulation, and death That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks; Birth, and copulation, and death T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes © 2018 Kwiple.com
Good news But the production of killer zombie mice is not on the agenda. Financial Times, January 13, 2017, in a report about potential uses of technology developed by Yale University researchers to turn on and off the neurons in mice brains that control hunting, subduing and killing prey and inanimate mobile plastic toys © 2017 Kwiple.com
Gun control activists say Guns will be the death of us Placard, Fort Worth, Texas, March For Our Lives rally, March 24, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Gun control activists say When I said I'd rather die than go to math class? That was hyperbole, assholes  Placard, March For Our Lives rally, March 24, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Gun control activists say Who in your life would have to die for you to support gun control? Placard, Las Vegas, Nevada, March For Our Lives rally, March 24, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Gun lobbyists say If teachers and students were armed, fewer would be killed © 2018 Kwiple.com
Gun lobbyists say Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves. NRA, 11:43 AM – 7 Nov 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Gun violence All developed nations regulate firearms more stringently than we do; compared with the citizens of twenty- two other high-income countries, Americans are ten times more likely to be killed by guns. In the past fifty years alone, more civilians have lost their lives to firearms within the United States than have been killed in uniform in all war in American history. Adam Hochschild, New York Review of Books, April 5, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Higher education Since the 1990s, the death rate for white men with a bachelor's degree aged between 45 and 54 in the US has fallen by 40 per cent, but it has risen by 25 per cent for white men in the same age group without a college degree. You can't be free if you are dead. Timothy Garten Ash, Prospect magazine, January/February 2021 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Hypocrites say We have not done a very good job of making sure that people that have mental reasons for not being able to handle a gun getting their name into the FBI files and we need to concentrate on that. Chuck “the Schmuck” Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa and lead sponsor of standalone legislation that made it easier for people adjudicated to be seriously mentally ill to buy guns and not have their name added to FBI files, commenting on the killing of 17 and wounding of 14 at a Parkland, Florida, high school by a mentally ill ex-student armed with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle he legally bought off-the-rack at a local gunshop  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Require all American flags to be flown at half staff until mass shootings drop below one per year © 2017 Kwiple.com
Looks  People in the Delta look better dead, whether in their coffins or obituaries. Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral © 2018 Kwiple.com
Making money the old-fashioned way Making or selling caskets © 2016 Kwiple.com
Profiles in courage A little over a month after his inauguration, on Feb. 28, 2017, President Trump signed HJ Resolution 40, a bill that made it easier for people with mental illness to obtain guns. CBS News then asked the White House to release the photograph of Mr. Trump signing the bill, making the request a total of 12 times. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders finally responded to repeated emails and phone calls with a one-line note on April 19, 2017, writing to CBS News, “We don't plan to release the picture at this time.” CBS News. February 15, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Public discourse ‘Agony’ is now a word used to describe the emotions of football fans whose team has lost a cup final in extra time, or the physical discomfort associated with certain types of dental treatment. It used to mean the final stages of a difficult or painful death. Seamus O'Mahony, The Way We Die Now © 2018 Kwiple.com
Republicans say For all we pay them, teachers better be willing to take a bulllet for the kids  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Selfie I have got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.  Thomas Carlyle © 2018 Kwiple.com
Selfie I have finished my task here. Albert Einstein's last words © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie Excuse My Dust  Dorothy Parker's proposed epigraph for herself © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.  Dorothy Parker © 2017 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He pisses ice water. Donald Trump portrayed by Roy Cohn, his mentor, who Trump refused to visit in the hospital when Cohn way dying from AIDS © 2018 Kwiple.com
the South We're people with a strong sense of community, and being dead is no impediment to belonging to it. We won't forget you just because you've up and died. We may even like you better and visit you more often. Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral © 2018 Kwiple.com
State of the union Death rate of middle-aged whites surges atop drug and alcohol abuse, liver disease, suicide © 2015 Kwiple.com
Success Garlanded go-getters like Midgley are walking arguments against success. There's a lesson for us all here. It's worth asking every morning: am I Thomas Midgley? Should I go to work today, or will the world be better off if I stay in bed playing League of Legends  in my underwear? “Did little damage” is a good line to have on one’s tombstone. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, December 11/12, 2021 [Midgley invented leaded gasoline, which ended “knocking” in engines but killed millions, and chlorofluorocarbon, used in air conditioning but depleted ozone in the upper atmosphere] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest For 20 minutes, the only spirits present appeared to be the Jack Daniel's. citation New York Times, June 25, 2017, commenting on a séance hosted by Larry and Toby Milstein, siblings and billion-heirs, at their apartment once owned by Leonard Bernstein, where they and friends invoked spirits of deceased musical tenants by singing songs they wrote and downing Champagne splits and Jack Daniel's © 2017 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest Funeral directors calling themselves “celebration event coordinators” --> © 2016 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest Half the size of Zurich, but twice the fun Said of Vienna's Central Cemetery © 2017 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest If Bolton replaces McMaster (and I've heard Kelly likes Bolton), we are all going to die. Colin Kahl, 1:25 PM - 1 Mar 2018 --> © 2018 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest Make-believe-you chatbots that converse with others after you're dead © 2016 Kwiple.com
Tech bros say Cheat death --> © 2017 Kwiple.com
Terrorism In the CSIS [Center for Strategic and International Studies] study of 893 terrorist incidents on US soil between January 1994 and May 2020,  only 22 of the 3,086 deaths due to terrorism were caused by left-wing groups. Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say Death to ALL traitors! Michele Morrow, 5:28 AM – 17 May 2020, responding to a fake Time magazine cover showing Barack Obama in an electric chair [She's the 2024 Republican candidate for superintendent of schools in North Caroilina] © 2024 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death. Michele Morrow, 7:01 PM – 13 May 2020, responding to a conspiracy theory about shipping Barack Obama to Guantanamo Bay detention camp [She's the 2024 Republican candidate for superintendent of schools in North Caroilina] © 2024 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say  These are not innocent Palestinian civilians. Brian Mast,  when asked about Palestinian babies killed by Israeli attackers in Gaza © 2024 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view. Email received by a 52-year-old member of the election board in Fulton County, GA, which Biden won and Trump accused of stealing the election © 2021 Kwiple.com
War I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My county is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. William Butler Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” © 2016 Kwiple.com
War If you could hear at every jolt, the blood Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desparate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Wilfred Owen, “Dulce Et Decorun Est” © 2015 Kwiple.com