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“There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
“That all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand…”
”…who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
…….
When he himself might his quietus make…”
“Our soul, with its fluttering hopes and alarmed curiosity is made to flee from death, and seems to think, if we judge her by its action, that to miss experience altogether is worse and sadder than any life, however troubled or short.” George Santayana in Soliloquies in England
A specter is haunting mankind today—the specter of cosmic genocide. The Bomb has moved man towards the precipice hanging over a bottomless abyss. The age-old faith in the continuity of life, in a “Chain of Being” (Lovejoy) has been shaken and universal death may well become our final “Reality.” It has given rise to the feeling that planning and saving are tentative, if not futile, that Armaggedon may