Life Extension Quotes

“The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ... Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.”
― Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp

“Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Phoning Home

“Until such time as duplications of individual nervous systems can be grown in tissue cultures (at this point no one knows "whose" consciousness they would have), our special identities will always be subject to being hit by a truck or dying in a plane crash. A sudden virus or heart seizure, even in the body's youth, may carry us off. Statistically, looking ahead thousands of years, the chances are that every human and even inanimate form will be broken sooner or later. But the distress felt by men and women today does not arise from the fear of such hazards. Rather, it comes from the certainty of aging and physical degeneration leading to death. It is the fear of losing our powers and being left alone, or in the hands of indifferent nurses, and knowing that the moment must come when we will not see the people we love any more, and everything will go black.”
― Alan Harrington, The Immortalist

“Our conception of immortality now requires precise definition. What must be eliminated from the human situation is the inevitability of death as a result and natural end of the aging process. I am speaking of the inescapable parabolic arching from birth to death. But we must clearly understand that any given unit of life -- my individual existence and yours -- can never be guaranteed eternity.”
― Alan Harrington, The Immortalist

“We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard...believing that it was a time for visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible meta-physics was needed.”
― Timothy Leary, Neuropolitique

“I believe we all come back from this life as the cats in Istanbul.”
― K. Eltinaé, The Moral Judgement of Butterflies

“The problem was time. Her augmented physiology had given her the time to go from hardened bigot to tolerant, relaxed progressive, reserving fear and hatred for the truer Enemy. She even had time to regress back. Alder Malone probably wasn’t going to have the time.
"He changed clothes in front of me … like I was some pet, some dog. Privacy is between humans.”
― Mark Ferguson, Terra Incognita

“We have long since gone beyond the moon, touched down on Mars, the moon, harnessed nuclear energy, artificially reproduced DNA, and now have the biochemical means to control birth; why should death itself, "the Last Enemy", be considered sacred and beyond conquest?”
― Alan Harrington, The Immortalist