Daily Inspiration Quote by Jack Kevorkian

Kevorkian’s line is built like a moral job description: if fear is the problem, he casts himself as the remedy. The phrasing is bluntly paternalistic in the most literal sense of “doctor knows best,” but it’s also a radical reframing of care. Terror, not disease, is the emergency. That pivot matters because it shifts the debate from abstract sanctity-of-life rhetoric to a more intimate, harder-to-dismiss scene: a person at the edge of suffering, frightened of what comes next, and someone deciding whether compassion means prolonging life at all costs or relieving dread at any cost.

The key word is “up to me.” Kevorkian isn’t asking for society’s permission; he’s staking a claim to agency and obligation. It’s an activist’s sentence disguised as bedside reassurance, asserting that institutions have failed to handle the most human part of dying: panic, indignity, the sense of being trapped in a body that has become a threat. The subtext dares you to consider terror as a form of violence inflicted by neglect, bureaucracy, and moral squeamishness.

Context sharpens the edge. Kevorkian became a symbol and a lightning rod in the assisted-suicide wars of the 1990s, when “choice” and “mercy” collided with legal prohibitions and religious opposition. In that climate, “dispel” is deliberately ambiguous: it can mean comfort, sedation, honesty, presence. Kevorkian’s critics heard something else: the self-appointed authority to end life. The quote works because it sits precisely on that fault line, forcing the reader to decide whether his certainty is compassion or control.