Jacob M. Appel Quotes

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

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

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

Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform.

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

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

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

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

Even a poor tour guide is entitled to some happiness.

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

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.

This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.

A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.

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

Always warm up the audience with a joke....If you are not a particularly funny person, make sure that you inform them that it's a joke.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery.

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

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.

Most people are far more concerned that they can control their own bodies than they are about petitioning Congress.

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.

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

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.

That was the heart of the problem: every choice made sense from some vantage point.