Life's Pleasures Quote by Jack Kevorkian

Asceticism, here, isn’t a spiritual pose. It’s Kevorkian building a courtroom-ready persona: a man so uninterested in comfort that he can’t be accused of selling death for money, status, or thrills. The repetition of “I don’t enjoy” lands like testimony, not confession. He’s stripping himself down to a single credential that matters in his fight over assisted suicide: purity of motive.

The subtext is aggressive. Kevorkian isn’t merely saying he’s modest; he’s saying the usual carrots of American life do not work on him, so the usual moral suspicions won’t either. Flashy cars, good clothes, “good food” are shorthand for corruption and distraction, the things that make a crusader seem like a grifter. By rejecting them, he claims a kind of mechanical integrity: he does this because he believes it’s necessary, not because it’s rewarding. That makes him both harder to dismiss and harder to humanize.

The last line, “This is the best I’ve dressed in months,” punctures the monastic list with a grim little wink. It suggests he’s been dragged into public view by a society that wants to prosecute him, sensationalize him, or both. Context matters: Kevorkian operated in the 1990s culture war around autonomy, suffering, and medical authority, where “Dr. Death” was as much a media character as a legal defendant. This quote is him rejecting that branding by leaning into another archetype: the uncompromising outsider who can’t be bought, only opposed.