“Being asked for what purpose he thought men were bom, he laughingly replied “ To realise how much better it were not to be born.”
― Operette morali
― Operette morali
“Viewed from a wholly logical point of view the bearing and rearing of children is a thoroughly unattractive proposition. To a woman it means pain and endless worry. To a man it means extra work extending over many years to support his family. So, if we were wholly logical about sex, we should probably not bother to reproduce at all. Nature takes care of this by making us utterly and wholly irrational.”
― The Black Cloud
― The Black Cloud
“If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?”
― The Trouble With Being Born
― The Trouble With Being Born
“It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place”
― Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
― Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
“One naive pro-natalist assumption is that because death is a bad thing, procreation, which can be considered the antonym of death is a god thing, but the naive defect in that assumption is that it ignores the obvious fact that procreation is an essential (and the ultimate cause) of death”
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rSmith’s 2024 Year in Books
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