Daily Inspiration Quote by Jack Kevorkian

Duty is Kevorkian's shield and his spear. By leading with "my intent" and "carry out my duty as a doctor", he borrows the moral authority of medicine - a profession coded in public life as care, restraint, and humility - and aims it at the most explosive ethical edge case: killing as treatment. The sentence is built like a clinical note, not a confession. "End their suffering" arrives as the primary verb of compassion; "ending of the life" is demoted into a regrettable procedural add-on, padded with passive, awkward phrasing that keeps agency hazy. Even the grammar tries to anesthetize the act.

"Unfortunately" does heavy lifting. It signals reluctance, an attempt to preempt the accusation of zealotry. Kevorkian frames death not as a goal but as an unavoidable side effect of mercy, a rhetorical move that flips the usual hierarchy: life becomes the vessel, suffering the disease. When he says "in their cases", he tightens the claim to individual narratives, insulating himself from the charge of advocating broad, indiscriminate euthanasia. It's a lawyerly narrowing disguised as bedside manner.

The cultural context is late-20th-century America, where technology stretched dying into a prolonged, bureaucratic experience and where patients' rights movements clashed with religious and legal prohibitions. Kevorkian understood that the debate wasn't just about autonomy; it was about who gets to define "care". His phrasing insists that medicine's highest duty isn't always preservation - it's relief, even when relief detonates the old moral calculus.