Best 43 quotes of Jacob M. Appel on MyQuotes

A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms.

Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you're going on a date.

Catholic extremism should be resisted as fiercely at home as we oppose the Taliban abroad.

Choose old people for enemies. They die. You win.

Depression and hopelessness are not the only reasons terminally ill patients wish to end their lives. Many individuals see nothing undignified about choosing to end their lives at the time and manner of their choosing - and many view such a choice as the meaningful culmination of a good life.

Even a poor tour guide is entitled to some happiness.

I am grateful that I have rights in the proverbial public square - but, as a practical matter, my most cherished rights are those that I possess in my bedroom and hospital room and death chamber.

I can handle being married for my money; it's being married for my life insurance that gives me pause.

If freedom means anything at all, it is the right to primacy in regard to sexuality, reproduction, medical care and death.

If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty.

If you give a man a hammer, he thinks he can solve all problems by pounding. Well, God gave men penises.

I suspect that the vast majority of people, not knowing in advance whether they will either end up in a permanently vegetative state or be diagnosed with cancer, would prefer that any resources that would be spent on PVS care be reallocated to cancer research - or some similar enterprise that has the potential to help human beings who might actually recover.

I used to dream of true love; now I'm open to false, but convincing.

I would prefer to believe that a market in fetal organs would empower women to use their reproductive capabilities to their own economic advantage.

Know your load. That's rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I'm not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando twobirds short of a dinner party....I know I'm pulling out of Houston with exactly forty-two Gentoo penguins, seventeen Jamaican land iguanas, four tuataras from New Zealand, and a pair of rare, civet-like mammals called linsangs. No more, no less.

Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy.

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.

Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer.

Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we've known closely, and equally by those we've never known at all - and that we too can change the world long after we've left it.

Money spent on vegetative patients is money not spent on preventive care, such as flu shots and mammograms. Each night in an ICU bed for such patients is a night that another patient with a genuine prognosis for recovery is denied such high-end care. Every dollar exhausted on patients who will never wake up again is a dollar not devoted to finding a cure for cancer.

Much as constitutional guarantees of press freedom do little good for prospective publishers if they do not have access to paper or ink, the right to aid in dying is strikingly useless if nobody is willing to help.

Much as we do not permit convicted pedophiles to teach kindergarten or convicted hijackers to board airplanes, common sense dictates that individuals who have been imprisoned for plotting violence against abortion clinics should never again be permitted anywhere near such facilities.

Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform.

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.

The boss is never your friend, even if you're sleeping with him.

The cold, cruel reality is that with one current justice now approaching ninety, and four others over seventy, the day will inevitably arrive when a sitting justice lies in an intensive care unit, both unable to resign and unable to resume his or her duties.

The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are ideas at all.

The only thing more difficult than persuading someone else to start having sex with you is persuading yourself to stop.

Victory [over homophobia] may require five or maybe 20 years. Yet I have no doubt that "don't ask, don't tell" and same-sex adoption bans will be as unspeakable and inexplicable to my grandchildren as counting a slave as three-fifths of a human being.

While the visible victims may draw the headlines and attract indignant protests from so-called "pro-life" organizations, the invisible victims are people like you and me who will suffer from diseases that are never cured because funds are being poured down a healthcare sieve in order to maintain permanently-unconscious bodies on complex and costly forms of life support.

Another family crisis: The rabbit goes blind.

Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.

Battery Park resonates with lust as the sun approaches its zenith. A primal impulse takes hold of the young couples strolling the gravel walkways, the newlyweds who have paused to admire DeModica’s bronze bull, the truant teens laid out on the cool grass. Maybe because all flesh tantalizes in the early summer, in the right light, or because, at this time of year, there is more flesh exposed, midriffs, cleavage, inner thighs, the park is suddenly transformed into a dynamo of panting and groping. This desire is not the tender affection of evening, the wistful intimacy of the twilight’s last gleam. It is raw, concupiscent hunger.

Harlem sleeps late.

I have vicarious morning sickness. Other people's babies make me nauseous.

My mother, God rest her soul, often warned that love closes your eyes, but marriage opens them wide. I am not sure if this is fair. Closeness without conflict, as they say, exists only in the cemetery.

Never make enemies of anyone younger or healthier than you are. They write your history.

Nixon’s offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Nobody loses weight eating anyplace with laminated menus.

Now I know how to make it as a pedophile. Forget lollypops. Antarctic wildlife is the ticket.

One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy.

Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying interest is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine’s favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure.

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge.