"The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end"
About this Quote
Toynbee is a journalist who has long written about inequality and the welfare state, so the context is almost certainly a debate about health and social care: funding, staffing, end-of-life support, the politics of an aging population. The subtext: stop asking health services to perform miracles they cannot perform, and stop using death as proof of failure. In a culture that treats dying as an avoidable scandal, her phrasing reframes it as a shared destination - which is also a quiet argument for solidarity. If death is the one thing that cuts across class, then access to comfort, pain relief, and humane support should not be stratified by income, geography, or luck.
The intent is corrective rather than defeatist. It lowers the volume on techno-utopian promises and raises a harder, more mature metric of "best care": not endless intervention, but honesty, compassion, and resources aimed at making lives - and endings - less brutal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Toynbee, Polly. (2026, January 15). The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-best-care-on-earth-cannot-prevent-us-all-163727/
Chicago Style
Toynbee, Polly. "The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-best-care-on-earth-cannot-prevent-us-all-163727/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The best care on earth cannot prevent us all dying in the end." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-best-care-on-earth-cannot-prevent-us-all-163727/. Accessed 8 Feb. 2026.







