"None of them want to delay. Understand that. None of them"
About this Quote
Urgency is doing the heavy lifting here, not argument. Kevorkian’s clipped insistence - “None of them want to delay. Understand that. None of them” - reads like a man trying to drag the listener out of abstraction and into a hospital room where time isn’t philosophical, it’s pain on a schedule. The repetition is prosecutorial: he’s not building a nuanced case so much as cornering you into acknowledging a fact he considers morally decisive.
The specific intent is to reframe assisted dying away from the fears of outsiders (slippery slopes, cultural decline, medical ethics as doctrine) and toward the lived tempo of the patient. “Delay” becomes the villain: not death, not choice, but the bureaucratic and moral stalling that forces people to endure what they’ve already judged intolerable. That one-word focus is tactical. It turns the debate into a question of harm inflicted by hesitation.
Subtext: he’s anticipating the standard paternalism - you might change your mind, let’s wait, let’s consult, let’s preserve options - and rejecting it as a luxury available only to the healthy. “Understand that” is both plea and reprimand, a demand that empathy outrank ideology. The final “None of them” seals it with absolutism, using certainty as a shield against the suspicion that patients are ambivalent or manipulable.
Context matters because Kevorkian wasn’t a neutral commentator; he was the lightning rod of the right-to-die movement, speaking under scrutiny from courts, media, and medical authorities. The line is designed to survive that scrutiny by sounding less like advocacy and more like testimony.
The specific intent is to reframe assisted dying away from the fears of outsiders (slippery slopes, cultural decline, medical ethics as doctrine) and toward the lived tempo of the patient. “Delay” becomes the villain: not death, not choice, but the bureaucratic and moral stalling that forces people to endure what they’ve already judged intolerable. That one-word focus is tactical. It turns the debate into a question of harm inflicted by hesitation.
Subtext: he’s anticipating the standard paternalism - you might change your mind, let’s wait, let’s consult, let’s preserve options - and rejecting it as a luxury available only to the healthy. “Understand that” is both plea and reprimand, a demand that empathy outrank ideology. The final “None of them” seals it with absolutism, using certainty as a shield against the suspicion that patients are ambivalent or manipulable.
Context matters because Kevorkian wasn’t a neutral commentator; he was the lightning rod of the right-to-die movement, speaking under scrutiny from courts, media, and medical authorities. The line is designed to survive that scrutiny by sounding less like advocacy and more like testimony.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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