Time & Perspective Quote by Jack Kevorkian

Kevorkian doesn’t dress this up as noble sacrifice; he strips it down to a brutally personal demand: control over his own ending. The provocation is the point. By saying he wants “some colleague” ready to “come help me,” he reframes assisted death not as a rare mercy but as a service that should exist like any other kind of care, administered by professionals, without panic or stigma. “Colleague” is doing quiet work here: he’s not asking for an outlaw friend or a shadowy accomplice. He’s imagining a legitimate medical peer, which is exactly what the law and mainstream medicine refused to grant him.

The line “That’s what I’m fighting for, me” is both disarming and strategic. Kevorkian understands that altruism is the acceptable mask for political demands; he rips the mask off, betting that honesty will read as integrity rather than narcissism. He anticipates the audience’s recoil (“Now that sounds selfish”) and then refuses to apologize for it. The subtext is that autonomy is not a community project. It’s an individual right that becomes real only when it applies to the person speaking.

“And if it helps somebody else, so be it” lands as a challenge to America’s preferred moral narrative, where suffering must be redeemed by meaning. Kevorkian’s ethic is colder, more clinical: if a policy protects him, it will protect others as a side effect. In the context of the 1990s “Dr. Death” media circus and prosecutions, this is a counter-myth: not martyrdom, not heroism, just a stubborn insistence that the last decision should belong to the one who has to live - and die - with it.