A biography for Jack Kevorkianhasn’t been written yet.
“Listen, when you take my liberty away, you've taken away more-something more precious than life. I mean, what good is a life without liberty? Huh? None.”
“The Jews were gassed. Armenians were killed in every conceivable way... So the Holocaust doesn't interest me, see? They've had a lot of publicity, but they didn't suffer as much.”
“I would not want to live with a tube in my neck and not be able to move a finger. I wouldn't - that to me is not life.”
“Maybe I won't stay out of prison. Who knows?”
“All the big powers they've silenced me. So much for free speech and choice on this fundamental human right.”
“This (...) had made me aware for the first time of the well-disguised myth that they and the academic institutions they represent are bastions of a free exchange of ideas. They are -but only of those ideas that don't 'rock the boat', that refrain from challenging hallowed taboos.”
“I don't persuade to suicide.”
“Yes, we need euthanasia, for certain cases where people are in comas or too immobile to even press a button.”
“I'm for absolute autonomy of the individual, and an adult, competent woman has absolute autonomy. It's her choice.”
“I'm not a romantic.”
“I always said all my life if I wasn't born and they gave me the question I'd say I don't want to be born.”
“I want some colleague to be free to come help me when I say the time has come. That's what I'm fighting for, me. Now that sounds selfish. And if it helps somebody else, so be it.”
“I knew I was getting into one of the most illegal things in the world. It was the right thing to do.”
“A transfer of money should never be involved in this profound situation. Although illness is profound, too, but medicine's a business today. It's a business.”
“You've gotta know what death is to know life!”
“Not one has shown an iota of fear of death. They want to end this agony.”
“We are all terminal.”
“How can you regret helping a suffering patient?”