Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
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Rothschild’s Fiddle (1894)Anton Chekhov
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Death has been the great leveler/ Of all honour, glory and name./ None can take anything with them/ To their tomb! Death! The sobering fact/ Of all our yearnings and longings!/ “What does it profit a man …”/ If he cannot take any of the things/ To his grave.
Kuruvilla Pandikattu
At present, there are hundreds of thousands of prisoners in Germany of all nationalities and degrees, partly in camps, but for the most part, however, as workers...The dangers of inter-mixing and bastardizing of our people are extraordinarily grave. They lie to a great extent in the almost unlimited lack of knowledge throughout our nation of the problems of blood.
Gunther Pancke
since life is uncertain, there is something one desires to preserve, desires to safeguard for oneself. […] It could not be something temporal, inasmuch as for life’s sake it probably would be desirable to preserve it, but how would one wish to preserve it for death’s sake, since it is precisely that which one abandons in death, which without envy and without preference would make everyone equal, equally poor, equally powerless, equally miserable, the one who possessed a world and the one who had nothing not love, the one who left behind a claim upon a world and the one who was in debt for a world, the one whom thousands obeyed and the one whom no one knew except death, the one whose loveliness was the object of people’s admiration and the poor wretch who sought only a grave in order to hide from people. It would have to be something eternal, then, that the discourse was about or, more accurately, what it could truly be about, and, in a single word, what else could that be but a person’s soul?
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
We may no longer be able to count; but Fate will count. Some day the men will be killed, and the women and children. And they also will disappear — they who stand erect upon the ignominious death of the soldiers, — they will disappear along with the huge and palpitating pedestal in which they were rooted. But they profit by the present, they believe it will last as long as they, and as they follow each other they say, "After us, the deluge." Some day all war will cease for want of fighters.
Henri Barbusse
We shall increase income tax on the better off so that we can help the hundreds of thousands of families now tangled helplessly in the poverty trap by raising the tax threshold and introducing reduced rates of tax for those at the bottom of the ladder. I warn you, there are going to be howls of anguish from the rich. But before you cheer too loudly let me warn you that a lot of you will pay extra taxes too.
Denis Healey
Chekhov, Anton
Chelcicky, Petr
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