"I gambled and I lost. I failed in securing my options for this choice for myself, but I succeeded in verifying the Dark Age is still with us"
About this Quote
A gambler’s shrug turns into a moral indictment. Kevorkian frames his defeat as a wager, not a mistake: he “gambled” on the possibility that the public, the courts, and the medical establishment could tolerate a person’s right to choose the terms of their own death. Losing that bet isn’t just personal failure; it’s evidence, he argues, that society still operates with medieval reflexes about bodily autonomy.
The syntax does a lot of work. “I failed in securing my options for this choice for myself” is clunky on purpose, like legal language choking ordinary speech. It mirrors the very problem he’s naming: the state and institutions translate intimate decisions into permissions, “options,” and procedural traps. Then he flips the ledger: failure becomes “success” because it produces proof. That’s the activist’s consolation prize, but it’s also a provocation. He’s telling the audience that if you’re comfortable with his loss, you’re complicit in the “Dark Age.”
Context matters: Kevorkian’s assisted-suicide activism in the 1990s collided with an American culture that romanticizes personal freedom while outsourcing end-of-life suffering to hospitals, courts, and euphemism. “Dark Age” isn’t just a swipe at religion or conservatism; it’s a critique of modern institutions that claim enlightenment yet recoil from death, pain, and patient agency. The line dares you to ask: who gets to call a choice “dignity,” and who gets punished for trying to make it real?
The syntax does a lot of work. “I failed in securing my options for this choice for myself” is clunky on purpose, like legal language choking ordinary speech. It mirrors the very problem he’s naming: the state and institutions translate intimate decisions into permissions, “options,” and procedural traps. Then he flips the ledger: failure becomes “success” because it produces proof. That’s the activist’s consolation prize, but it’s also a provocation. He’s telling the audience that if you’re comfortable with his loss, you’re complicit in the “Dark Age.”
Context matters: Kevorkian’s assisted-suicide activism in the 1990s collided with an American culture that romanticizes personal freedom while outsourcing end-of-life suffering to hospitals, courts, and euphemism. “Dark Age” isn’t just a swipe at religion or conservatism; it’s a critique of modern institutions that claim enlightenment yet recoil from death, pain, and patient agency. The line dares you to ask: who gets to call a choice “dignity,” and who gets punished for trying to make it real?
Quote Details
| Topic | Failure |
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