Top 40 Jacob M. Appel Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

3. “Even a poor tour guide is entitled to some happiness.”

— Jacob M. Appel

4. “The boss is never your friend, even if you’re sleeping with him.”

— Jacob M. Appel

5. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

6. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

8. “Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy.”

— Jacob M. Appel

9. “Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform.”

— Jacob M. Appel

10. “Choose old people for enemies. They die. You win.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

12. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

13. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

16. “Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you’re going on a date.”

— Jacob M. Appel

17. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

18. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

21. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

22. “I can handle being married for my money; it’s being married for my life insurance that gives me pause...”

— Jacob M. Appel

23. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

25. “I used to dream of true love; now I’m open to false, but convincing...”

— Jacob M. Appel

26. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

27. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

29. “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

30. “Men Have Feelings Too, But Who Cares?” A second asked, “With So Many Boys, Why Test on Animals?”

— Jacob M. Appel

31. “You can measure a man’s sorrow, and the world’s, in the number of stories that perish unheard.”

— Jacob M. Appel

32. “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.”

— Jacob M. Appel

33. “He had a knack for expressing sober what most men only dared say drunk.”

— Jacob M. Appel

34. “He’d grown up with parents who’d survived the Depression. He was generous, but not deranged.”

— Jacob M. Appel

35. “That was the one advantage of growing old – it let you be nasty with impunity.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

37. “Nobody loses weight eating anyplace with laminated menus.”

— Jacob M. Appel

38. “I have vicarious morning sickness. Other people’s babies make me nauseous.”

— Jacob M. Appel

39. “An American man endowed with sufficient wealth can purchase anything, but an American woman endowed with sufficient beauty does not need to.”

— Jacob M. Appel

40. “I insert the bevel and draw back the plunger. I know that the syringe contains more than sodium chloride-that even as the toxic contents fill my fathers veins, he is sharing with me his final gift: the horror and thrill of saving lives.”

— Jacob M. Appel

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

— Jacob M. Appel

42. “If history judged nations by their pet theories, no one could ever doubt that Americans were creative.”

— Jacob M. Appel