Antinatalismo

Antinatalism – list of books, articles and quotes (2013-2018, last update: 27.10.2018) From left: Julio Cabrera, Emil Cioran and Peter Wessel Zapffe. The latest version is available on: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=93087#post93087 Big thanks to Karim Akerma and Theophile de Giraud for their antinatalist research and translations, and to all others for their translations: Thiago Lenharo di Santis, Joshua Queiros, Duarte Martinho, John Kalvall, Tharana Mahimekhalai, Kevin Pinkerton, Dawid Pietruszewski, Andreas Nilssen Moss and Manuel De Pool. Index: Ackerman Louise-Victorine: 2 quotes Akerma Karim: 3 books, 5 articles, 9 quotes Al-Ma'arri Abul 'ala: 11 quotes al-Qasimi Abdullah: 2 quotes Allen Woody: 1 quote Andreyev Leonid: 2 quotes dos Anjos Augusto: 1 quote Annaba Philippe: 2 books (1 novel), 5 quotes Auden Wystan Hugh: 4 quotes Audians: 1 quote Augustine of Hippo: 1 quote Barker Clive: 1 quote Barnes Djuna: 4 quotes Beckett Samuel: 9 quotes Benatar David: 3 books, 3 articles, 9 quotes Bernhard Thomas: 4 quotes Bleibohm Gunter: 1 book, 1 quote Bogomil, Bogomils: 6 quotes Borborites: 3 quotes Brach-Czaina Jolanta: 1 quote Brune Elisa: 1 quote Buddha Siddhartha Gautama: 3 quotes Byron George: 1 quote Cabrera Julio: 5 books, 4 articles, 12 quotes Calderon Pedro: 1 quote Cancian Andre: 2 quotes Casanova Giacomo: 1 quote Cassianus Julius: 1 quote Cathars: 6 quotes Ceronetti Guido: 7 quotes Chah Ajahn: 2 quotes de Chateaubriand Francois-Rene: 1 quote Chowdhury Sayma H.: 1 article, 1 quote Cicero Marcus Tullius: 1 quote Cioran Emil: 1 book, 25 quotes Clementine Guillaume: 1 quote Contestabile Bruno: 2 articles, 2 quotes Cook Douglas: 1 quote Crawford Jim: 1 book, 1 quote Crisp Quentin S.: 1 article, 2 quotes Cynics: 1 quote Darrow Clarence: 2 quotes Darwesh S'ad: 1 quote Dashti Ali: 2 quotes David-Neel Alexandra: 1 quote dcrf: 1 quote Deschner Karlheinz: 1 quote Deshimaru Taisen: 1 quote Desproges Pierre: 1 quote Dostoevsky Fyodor: 2 quotes Drachline Pierre: 1 quote Druskowitz Helene: 1 quote Ducharme Rejean: 1 quote Ecclesiastes: 1 quote Encratites: 6 quotes Ettlinger Karl: 1 book (novel), 1 quote Euripides: 3 quotes Flammarion Camille: 1 quote Flaubert Gustave: 2 quotes Gandhi Mahatma: 3 quotes de Giraud Theophile: 1 book, 7 quotes von Goethe Johannn Wolfgang: 2 quotes de Goncourt Edmond and Jules: 1 quote Gonet Krystyna: 1 quote Grabowski Zbigniew: 2 quotes Greek Gospel of the Egyptians: 1 quote Gregor of Nyssa: 1 quote Haniya Yutaka: 1 quote Hardy Thomas: 1 quote Harrison Gerald: 2 article, 3 quotes Hayry Matti: 3 articles, 2 quotes Heine Heinrich: 1 quote Hicks Bill: 1 quote Horstmann Ulrich: 1 quote Huxley Aldous: 1 quote Hwang Jiwoon: 1 book, 1 quote Ionesco Eugene: 2 quotes Jaccard Roland: 7 quotes Jahnn Hans Henny: 1 quote Jastrun Mieczyslaw: 1 quote Jeremiah: 1 quote Job: 1 quote Kerouac Jack: 8 quotes Kertesz Imre: 1 quote Khayyam Omar: 4 quotes Kierkegaard Soren: 3 quotes Knight Les U: 2 quote Kociuba Grzegorz: 1 quote Kolney Fernand: 3 quotes Konopnicka Maria: 1 quote Kraszewski Jozef Ignacy: 2 quotes Krugovoy-Silver Anna: 1 quote Kundera Milan: 1 quote Kurnig (Quartus): 1 book, 1 article, 7 quotes de Lamartine Alphonse: 1 quote Larkin Philip: 1 quote Larock Marc: 1 article, 2 quotes Lawrence Thomas Edward: 1 quote Le Linda: 1 book Lenharo di Santis Thiago: 1 book, 4 quotes Leopardi Giacomo: 5 quotes Levy Joseph: 1 article, 1 quote Licon Jimmy Alfonso: 1 article, 1 quote Ligotti Thomas: 1 book, 8 quotes Locke William John: 1 quote Lovecraft Howard Phillips: 1 quote Lucian, Lucianists: 1 quote Lucretius: 1 quote Luther Martin: 1 quote Machado de Assis Joaquim Maria: 1 quote Mainlander Philipp: 2 quotes Mani, Manichaeans: 6 quotes Marcion of Sinope, Marcionites: 6 quotes de Maupassant Guy: 1 quote Melo Rafael Tages: 1 book Metzinger Thomas: 1 article, 1 quote Milosz Czeslaw: 2 quote Milton John: 1 quote Ming-Dao Deng: 1 quote Mishra Ramesh (Coates Ken): 1 book, 2 quotes Muller Philipp: 1 book Nagrobki: 1 quote Neuffer Martin: 1 book, 1 quote Onfray Michel: 6 quotes Pereleshin Valerii: 4 quotes Perry Sarah: 1 book, 1 quote Pessoa Fernando: 1 quote Phibionites (Borborites): 3 quotes Pizzolatto Nic: 2 quotes Prior Matthew: 1 quote Priscillian of Avila, Priscillianists: 3 quotes Puissance: 1 quote Puls Heiko: 1 article Rigoni Mario Andrea: 1 quote Robinson Marilynne: 1 quote Rulli Tina: 1 article, 1 quote Saturnilus of Antioch: 1 quote Schopenhauer Arthur: 6 quotes Schreiner Olive: 1 quote Schulman Sarah: 1 quote Seneca Lucius Annaeus: 1 quote Shackelford Todd K.: 1 article, 1 quote Shiffrin Seana: 1 quote Singh Asheel: 2 articles, 1 quote Smith Martin: 1 book, 4 quotes Smith Robert: 1 quote Sophocles: 1 quote Soriano Giovanni: 6 quotes Srivastava Pikesh: 1 book, 2 quotes Szilagyi Domokos: 1 quote Tanner Julia: 1 article, 2 quotes Tatian the Assyrian: 1 quote Thales of Miletus: 1 quote Theognis of Megara: 1 quote Tolstoy Lev: 1 quote Tonnessen Herman: 1 book, 1 quote Tremblay Francois: 1 book Vallejo Fernando: 6 quotes Verrecchia Anacleto: 2 quotes Vetter Hermann: 2 articles, 3 quotes de Vichy-Chamrond Marie Anne: 1 quote Vinding Magnus: 1 article, 1 quote Voltaire: 1 quote Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: 2 quotes Weininger Otto: 1 quote Weisberg David: 1 quote Wisdom of Silenus: 1 quote Wisnowska Maria: 1 quote Woolf Virginia: 1 quote Yanase Naoki: 1 quote Zapffe Peter Wessel: 2 books, 1 article, 12 quotes Zizek Slavoy: 1 quote Websites Ackerman Louise-Victorine Quotes: Miserable grain of dust That nothingness has rejected, Your life is one day on earth; You are nothing in the immensity. Your mother gave you birth, groaning: You were the son of his sorrows; And you saluted the existence Through shrill cries and tears, And ends with these lines: Under the weight of your ills your worn body succumbs, And, tasting the calm foretaste of the night, Your eye finally closes from the sleep of the grave: Rejoice, old man, this is your first happiness. - Louise-Victorine Ackermann, Man, 1830 - What! Having the Infinite Force Only to pay oneself distressing spectacles, Impose massacre, inflict agony, Wanting before his eyes only the dead and the dying! In front of this spectator of our extreme pains Our indignation will overcome all terror; We will intersect our rasps of blasphemies, Not without a secret desire to excite his fury. Who knows? We may find some insult Who irritates him so much that, with a mad arm, He tears up our dark planet from the heavens, And shattered this unfortunate globe in a thousand shards. Our audacity at least would save you from being born, You who still sleep in the depth of the future. And we would come out triumphant for having, by ceasing to be, forced God to wash his hands off of Humanity. Ah! What immense joy after so much suffering! Through the debris, over the mass graves. To finally be able to let out this cry of deliverance: No more men under the sky, we are the last! - Louise-Victorine Ackermann, Pascal Last Word, 1871 - Akerma Karim Books about antinatalism: Soll eine Menschheit sein? Eine fundamentalethische Frage, Traude Junghans, Cuxhaven- Dartford 1995 (German language) Verebben der Menschheit?: Neganthropie und Anthropodizee, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau 2000 (German language) Antinatalismus Ein Handbuch, epubli, 2017 (German language) Articles about antinatalism: Sollen Ausserirdische sein?, Ausserirdische Einleitung in die Philosophie, Munster, 2002 (German language) Theodicy shading off into Anthropodicy in Milton, Twain and Kant, Tabula Rasa. Die Kulturzeitung aus Mitteldeutschland 2010, No 49 Von der Existenzverwschung zur Daseins-Anklage. Antinatalismus in Georges Poulets unbekanntem Meisterwerk Rien n'est..., Tabula Rasa. Zeitung fur Gesellschaft und Kultur, Januar 2012 (German language) Was ist Antinatalismus?, Tabula Rasa. Zeitung fur Gesellschaft und Kultur, April 2014 (German language) Manifest zum antinatalismus. Zur ethik des antinatalismus fur nachkommenlosigkeit bei Mensch und tier, Pro iure animalis, July 2014 (German language) Quotes: Among the people who are created there are always some who will have to suffer unspeakably. This fact, having been considered not only by Schopenhauer and so-called pessimists, should urge any person to philosophize who is prepared to have a closer look only and especially at the 20th century. So far nobody has succeeded in demonstrating that the inconceivable though countless times inflicted suffering upon human beings, in Auschwitz and elsewhere throughout time and space, can be compensated for by former or the future happiness of the sufferers or other people. - Karim Akerma, Verebben der Menschheit?: Neganthropie und Anthropodizee, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau 2000, p. 9 - There is no natural necessity for the existence of human beings. Procreation falls everincreasingly into the realm of culture. Mankind would die out if nobody carried on the "torch of life". And shouldn't we be in favour of mankind's relatively humane dying out rather than advocating a continuation of the way of suffering? - Karim Akerma, Verebben der Menschheit?: Neganthropie und Anthropodizee, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau 2000, p. 17 - Only by means of relative or absolute childlessness, resulting in mankind's ebbing away, could happen what might be named borrowing from the Greek myth Sisyphus' revolt. He would give up his work, not in order to commit suicide but rather by refraining from having children who otherwise would have taken his spot. In such a way that in some point in time there would be no one in the rock's path which would eventually roll out. In terms of the Asian primordial decision: By means of abstention from procreation the wheel of suffering would be deprived of its impetus until it comes to a standstill. - Karim Akerma, Verebben der Menschheit?: Neganthropie und Anthropodizee, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau 2000, p. 378 - I suggest people should refrain from procreation as the good things in life do not compensate for the bad things and, first and foremost, the best things do not compensate for the worst things. The experience of unspeakable pain, the agonies of the wounded, sick or dying are not counterbalanced by the delight the sufferer experienced earlier in life; nor is the suffering of the inmates of concentration camps neutralized by many contemporary peoples' well-being. - Karim Akerma, Historically informed anti-natalism, official website, 2011 - Is there a moral reason to procreate with respect to the pleasure one's offspring would experience? I think not. Is there a moral reason not to procreate regarding the pain one's offspring would experience? I think the answer should be yes. Why is this so? Apparently, pleasure and pain do not count equally. Pain seems to weigh more, ethically speaking, than pleasure. This seems to be confirmed if we move to decisions and their reversal. Consider couple C who have decided not to procreate as they think their children would be miserable because of their genetic disposition. One day they are informed this was wrong. Their children would be extremely well off. Now consider couple D who have decided to procreate because they think their children would lead happy lives. One day they are informed their children would suffer extreme pain from the first day on. Apparently there is more reason for couple D to reverse their decision than there is for couple C. Which is to say: Expected pain outweighs expected pleasure by far. In ethics, pleasure and pain do not seem to be on a par. - Karim Akerma, Historically informed anti-natalism, official website, 2011 - Let me clarify this with respect to the institution of the slaughterhouse: The pleasure most people derive from eating meat is inextricably interwoven with intense suffering on the part of the animals that are raised and slaughtered. The animals's suffering is not compensated for by the fun most people experience when they eat meat. Pointing to some animals that have decent lives and are killed painlessly is to no avail. In a similar manner, the joy that a considerable number of people experience in their lives is built upon an ocean of suffering. As every procreation implies a lottery (genetically and socially) and as history has revealed to us what man is capable of doing to his counterpart, any decision to procreate should be reversed. While there is no such reason to reverse a decision not to procreate regarding those few who would presumably lead decent lives and die pain- and fearlessly. - Karim Akerma, Historically informed anti-natalism, official website 2011 - There is yet another aspect in Kant's philosophy that dooms any attempts to create an anthropodicy. In a similar fashion to Milton and Twain, Kant acknowledges that a person brought into existence is brought into existence without having requested it. This, however, cannot be reconciled with the following Kantian decree from his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only." (...) Any Kantian will have to face the precept never to reduce a human being to a means but always to treat her also as an end. Now, someone who does not exist yet, cannot be treated as a means. Neither can he be treated as an end. However, when deciding to procreate, parents inevitably conceive of the future person rather as a means than an end. They cannot, ontologically speaking, procreate for the sake of the person who will exist. They can, however, procreate in the pursuit of their own happiness or their country痴well-being. Note well that parents and countries do exist already. Creating a new human being inevitably goes along with conveiving of a human being as a means without being able to treat him as an end. The parents, the family or the institutions for the benefit of which the new person might exist do already exist, while the person that is conceived of does not exist yet. There is an asymmetry here inasmuch as procreation yields new people for the sake of existing people or institutions while procreation will never benefit someone who does not yet exist. To repeat the aforementioned: Someone could object that in the same manner in which they cannot be treated also as an end future people cannot be treated as a means as they do not exist yet. Looked at from a different point of view, from the point of view of imminent procreation, the argument is not convincing: If people procreate, pre-existing parental or societal needs, wishes, aspirations or demands are fulfilled (or not). The same does not apply to those who will start to exist because, had their parents not procreated, there wouldn's have been thwarted needs and wishes on the child's part. Procreation always involves pre-existing ends into which a new person fits as a means. Regarding procreation, it is not possible for us to treat non-existing future persons also as an end, whereas it is possible to conceive of them as a means. Therefore, in light of the Kantian request to always treat persons also as an end, we had rather not procreate. - Karim Akerma, Theodicy shading off into Anthropodicy in Milton, Twain and Kant, Tabula Rasa. Die Kulturzeitung aus Mitteldeutschland 2010, No 49 - Whoever procreate is a selfish ego-producer. On the other hand, whoever decides to adopt has the opportunity to show what true altruism is. - Karim Akerma, Antinatalismus Ein Handbuch, epubli, 2017 - Without God, clearly, one needs no theodicy. That is to say, there is no longer any point in enquiring into such matters as why God has permitted so much suffering or whether – if the creation of no other world than this deeply imperfect one were possible – He would have done better to forgo Creation of world and Man altogether. But modernity rid itself of the desire for a theodicy without seeing that, by doing this, it burdened itself with the obligation to provide an anthropodicy in this latter痴stead. This anthropodicy takes the form of the parallel but modified question: how can it be justified, in the face of so much suffering undergone in the past, being experienced in the present, and to be expected in the future, that human beings beget more human beings? - Karim Akerma, Antinatalismus Ein Handbuch, epubli, 2017 - Al-Ma'arri Abul 'ala Quotes: Better for Adam and all who issued forth from his loins that he and they, yet unborn, created never had been! For whilst his body was dust and rotten bones in the earth. Ah, did he feel what his children saw and suffered of woe? - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 74 - Whenever I reflect, my reflecting upon what I suffer only rouses me to blame him that begot me. And I gave peace to my children, for they are in the bliss of nonexistence which surpasses all the pleasures of this world. Had they come to life, they would have endured a misery casting them to destruction in trackless wildernesses. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 139 - If ye unto your sons would prove, By act how dearly them ye love, Then every voice of wisdom joins, To bid you leave them in your loins. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 139 - The rich man desires a son to inherit his wealth, but were the fathers intelligent no children would be born. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 139 - Procreation is a sin, though not called one. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 139 - A father wronged by his sons pays the just penalty for the crime which he committed against them. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 139 - To beget is to increase the sum of evil. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 139 - The lizard's ancestors are the cause of its being hunted. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 139 - It is better for a people, instead of multiplying, to perish off the face of the earth. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 139 - Refrain from procreation, for its consequence is death. - Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Poetry, Cambridge University Press, New York 1969, p. 140 - My father has perpetrated this crime against me; I am guilty of none. (Al-Ma'arri is said to have wanted this verse inscribed over his grave.) Other translation: This wrong was by my father done to me, but ne'er by me to one. - Sami Ayad Hanna, Arab Socialism, Brill Archive, Leiden 1969, p. 257 - - Dalya Cohen-Mor, Fathers and sons in the Arab Middle East, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2013, p. 139 - al-Qasimi Abdullah Quotes: The womb is the most dangerous factory in the world. - يا كل العالم لماذا أتيت؟ - All human actions are nothing more than attempts to heal the mistake of their existence. - أيها العقل من رآك؟ - Allen Woody Quotes: My wife and I had not brought any children into this world, instead we had adopted. But having your own children is not a beautiful thing. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I am too hard. But I think I'm not doin' someone a big favour by giving him life. - Kinder selbst zu produzieren, ist keine schone Sache, Welt, 09.11.2006 - Andreyev Leonid Quotes: And what are they doing with their children? I have never yet seen parents that do not deserve capital punishment; first because they begot children, and secondly because, having begot them, they did not immediately commit suicide. - Savva - Leonid Andreyev, Savva and The Life of Man, Forgotten Book, 2017 - What worse can happen to a man than to have been born? - Savva - Leonid Andreyev, Savva and The Life of Man, Forgotten Book, 2017 - dos Anjos Augusto Quotes: You began existing, raw jelly, And you will grow further, in your silence, so much so Which, is natural, still some day, the cry of your plasmic concretions flows! The water, in conjugation with the bare earth, Wins over the granite, depressing it... fright Convulses the spirits, and so, You development continues! Before, human jelly, do not progress And in undefined retrogradation, Return to the old calm of inexistence!... Before the Nothingness, oh! Germ, You shall still Reach it, like the germs of other beings To the supreme misfortune of being! - Augusto dos Anjos, A um germen, Eu & outras poesias, volume 2, Civilizaão Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro 1982, p 40 - Annaba Philippe Books about antinatalism: Bienheureux les steriles, Presses du Midi, Toulon 2002 (French language) Le Berceau, Presses du Midi, Toulon 2005, novel (French language) Quotes: Only procreators are responsible of themselves of society of humanity and its crimes - Philippe Annaba, Cris sans titre, sans musique, sans rien, Pierre Jean Oswald, Paris 1973, p. 12 - Cattle sleep well they peacefully chew the cud because they do not know tomorrow their calf will head to the slaughterhouse to the arena maybe they just do not care Do you, too, do not care about the fate of your children? - Philippe Annaba, Cris sans titre, sans musique, sans rien, Pierre Jean Oswald, Paris 1973, p. 14 - There is no more revolutions to do, Or wait. There is only one emergency, One vigilance: Refrain from begetting. To be at peace with the History that disappears then, with our last day. To be a at peace with the present, Who finally belongs to us. To be at peace with the future that no longer concerns us. - Philippe Annaba, Bienheureux les steriles, Presses du Midi, Toulon 2002, p. 109 - I do not want you To be born!... I do not want you To inherit Defects, Disorders and anxieties From your father. I do not want you… To wear on your face The nightmares of your mother. I do not want you… Barely out Of her entrails To cry… That in the polluted atmosphere Of our world You suffocate… And that we strike to resuscitate you. I do not want To hear your cries When you are thirsty When you are hungry When you are in pain. I do not want… To extricate you from your dreams And drag you to school Where fools Will force-feed you With stupefying nonsense. I do not want… Anything to do With your social development To teach you our smirks To teach you to bow down To deceive yourself. I do not want… The first maniac that comes along To touch a single of your hairs I do not want… The priest to threaten you with hell The schoolmaster, with unemployment The janitor, with prison. I do not want you… To inhabit my City Or listen To my television lying to you To slake your thirst On the venom of my journals. To play in the street With thugs Who will spit in your face. I do not want Sinister crooks To chain you to some drug, To turn you into an addict, To better abuse you, In the general indifference. I do not want Women to bewitch you With their arrogant breasts And their protruding asses, So many lures for one finality: Giving birth. Nor do I want Pretentious Casanovas To pursue you with their sycophancy And toy with your sensitivity. I do not want you… To waste your life Earning your daily bread By the sweat of your brow. Or else by a thousand renunciations By a thousand compromises. I do not want you… To fight for John Doe Or for anyone else Or for anything else. I do not want you… To see the next war To get cancer, Or witness one of the thousand evils to come. I do not want you… To suffer. I do not want you… To ask your father one day Why he let you come into a world That does not care about the world! I do not want you To be born There are enough slaves on earth! - Philippe Annaba, Je veux pas - Birth is the driving wheel of all ills. - Philippe Annaba, Bienheureux les steriles, Presses du Midi, Toulon 2002 - Auden Wystan Hugh Quotes: The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it, Not to be born is the best for man; The end of toil is a bailiff's order, Throw down the mattock and dance while you can. - Wystan Hugh Auden, Death's Echo - A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus, Not to be born is the best for man; An active partner in something disgraceful, Change your partner, dance while you can. - Wystan Hugh Auden, Death's Echo - The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can. - Wystan Hugh Auden, Death's Echo - The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, Not to be born is the best for man; The second-best is a formal order, The dance's pattern; dance while you can. Dance, dance for the figure is easy, The tune is catching and will not stop; Dance till the stars come down from the rafters; Dance, dance, dance till you drop. - Wystan Hugh Auden, Death's Echo - Audians Quotes about Audians: Because the Audians saw every part of the human body as being ruled by the seven evil powers, they rejected procreation and denied the resurrection of. - Roelof van den Broek, Gnostic Religion in Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, New York 2013, p. 168 - Augustine of Hippo Quotes: But I am aware of some that murmur: What, say they, if all men should abstain from all sexual intercourse, whence will the human race exist? Would that all would this, only in "charity out of a pure heart, and good conscience, and faith unfeigned" much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened. - Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: First Series, volume III St. Augustine: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, Cosimo, New York 2007, p. 404 - Barker Clive Quotes: I think babies cry when they're born because they are born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that gonna happen to them. That's why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit's still going to fly. - Lana - Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels, St. Martin's Press, New York 2015, p. 296 - Barnes Djuna Quotes about Djuna Barnes: Miss Barnes sees life and the perpetuation of life as a mistake; indeed, the mistake is to be alive, and then by procreation, to compound that error and produce more tragedy and pain. - James B. Scott, Djuna Barnes, Twayne Publishers, 1976, p. 24 - Because of its emphasis upon human bestiality and the need for mankind not to take the world seriously and to abstain from procreation, the thought of Djuna Barnes, if we wish to label it in any systematic way, would have to be called Saturninian Christian in character. - Andres Field, Djuna, the formidable Miss Barnes, University of Texas Press, 1985, p. 170 - Homosexuality seems hardly the issue, for Nightwood neither defends nor condemns it, except in one oblique way. Given that life is suffering, the greatest crime would be procreation, which seems to give homosexuality the edge as a preferred lifestyle, since it promotes the extinction of the human species. - Phillip F. Herring, Djuna: the life and work of Djuna Barnes, Viking, 1995, p. 207 - Barnes, on the other hand, shunned procreation and associated childbirth with death. - Peter Friedrich Monahan, The American Wild Man: The Science and Theatricality of Nondescription in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, and Djuna Barnes, ProQuest, 2008, p. 206 - Beckett Samuel Quotes: They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. - Pozzo - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1953 - Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. - Vladimir - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1953 - Birth was the death of him. - About character. - Samuel Beckett, A Piece of Monologue, 1979 - No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found. - Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, Abandoned Work, Grove Press, New York 1995, p. 158 - Quotes about Samuel Beckett: "No," he replied, when I asked him if he had ever wanted children, "that's one thing I'm proud of." - Lawrence Shainberg, Exorcising Beckett, The Paris review No. 104, Fall 1987 - It is the human will that for him is the prime mover towards action, and the human will is evil, leading mankind to evil deeds and the perpetuation through procreation of more evil. - John Calder, The philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Calder, 2001, p. 25 - Sex is always portrayed in Beckett with a mixture of fascination and disgust. His disgust, well described in his fictions, of the whole process of generation is rooted in a philosophical conviction: bringing life into an evil world must be evil, therefore the circumstances of birth with all their mess of blood and water and pain become not only unpleasant, but part of that evil. - John Calder, The philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Calder, 2001, p. 53 - As Beckett speculated about the creation of the world, he increasingly envisaged the creator as a monster, but not necessarily a conscious one. The only way to frustrate that God (or nature) was to produce no children, and Beckett was true to his own principle. - John Calder, The philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Calder, 2001, P. 130 - Time and again he targets parents as irresponsible criminals although, of course, in life courtesy prevented him from expressing his real feelings. Hamm denounces his parents in "Endgame" as "accursed progenitors" and Molloy is bitterly unable to forgive his mother for bringing him into the world. In private I knew Beckett to express a passive anger at those who insisted on having families. - John Calder, The philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Calder, 2001, p. 130 - Benatar David Books about antinatalism: Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, Oxford University Press, New York 2006 Procreation and Parenthood: The Ethics of Bearing and Rearing Children, Oxford University Press, New York, 2010, co-author with David Archard Debating Procreation: Is It Wrong To Reproduce?, Oxford University Press, New York 2015, co-author with David Wasserman Articles about antinatalism: Why it is Better Never to Come Into Existence, American Philosophical Quarterly 1997, volume 34, number 3, pp. 345-355 Every Conceivable Harm:A Further Defence of Anti-Natalism, South African Journal of Philosophy 2012, volume 31, number 1, pp. 128-164 Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to (More of) My Critics, The Journal of Ethics 2013, 17 (1-2), pp. 121-151 Quotes: Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child's sake. - David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Oxford University Press Inc., New York 2006, p. 2 (introduction) - 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. - David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Oxford University Press Inc., New York 2006, p. 6 (introduction) - Nor is the harm produced by the creation of a child usually restricted to that child. The child soon finds itself motivated to procreate, producing children who, in turn, develop the same desire. Thus any pair of procreators can view themselves as occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering. They experience the bad in their own lives. In the ordinary course of events they will experience only some of the bad in their children's and possibly grandchildren's lives (because these offspring usually survive their progenitors), but beneath the surface of the current generations lurk increasingly larger numbers of descendents and their misfortunes. Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pair's cumulative descendents over ten generations amount to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless, avoidable suffering. To be sure, full responsibility for it all does not lie with the original couple because each new generation faces the choice of whether to continue that line of descendents. Nevertheless, they bear some responsibility for the generations that ensue. If one does not desist from having children, one can hardly expect one's descendents to do so. - David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Oxford University Press Inc., New York 2006, pp. 6-7 (introduction) - Although, as we have seen, nobody is lucky enough not to be born, everybody is unlucky enough to have been born – and particularly bad luck it is, as I shall now explain. On the quite plausible assumption that one’s genetic origin is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for having come into existence,⁸ one could not have been formed by anything other than the particular gametes that produced the zygote from which one developed. This implies, in turn, that one could not have had any genetic parents other than those that one does have. It follows from this that any person’s chances of having come into existence are extremely remote. The existence of any one person is dependent not only on that person’s parents themselves having come into existence and having met⁹ but also on their having conceived that person at the time that they did.¹⁰ Indeed, mere moments might make a difference to which particular sperm is instrumental in a conception. The recognition of how unlikely it was that one would have come into existence, combined with the recognition that coming into existence is always a serious harm, yields the conclusion that one’s having come into existence is really bad luck. It is bad enough when one suffers some harm. It is worse still when the chances of having been harmed are very remote. - David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Oxford University Press Inc., New York 2006, p. 7 (introduction) - The argument that coming into existence is always a harm can be summarized as follows: Both good and bad things happen only to those who exist. However, there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things. The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things. - David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Oxford University Press Inc., New York 2006, p. 14 (introduction) - The aspect of my argument that has arguably been the target of most criticism has been my basic asymmetry. One response has been to deny it directly. Thus, it has been suggested that if we can claim that absent pain is good for a person then we can make the symmetrical claim that absent pleasure is bad. According to this argument, we should deny (4) of my basic asymmetry. The suggestion here is that it would "be bad, for the non-existent person we might have created, that his pleasure not occur, because it would have been good for him if it had occurred". The mistake in this objection is that it misconstrues my basic asymmetry as a logical rather than axiological claim. We certainly can (logically) state that just as the absent pains in Scenario B are good, so the absent pleasures are bad. The problem, I have suggested, is that we should not claim this. Among the reasons for this is that we would then not be able to make all the value judgments we do in the four asymmetries that I say are explained by the basic asymmetry. - David Benatar, Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to (More of) My Critics, The Journal of Ethics 2013, 17 (1-2), p. 126 - A few of my critics have claimed that I am committed to the desirability of suicide and even speciecide. They clearly intend this as a reductio ad absurdum of my position. However, I considered the questiions of suicide and speciecide in Better Never to Have Been and argued that these are not implications of my view. First, it is possible to think that both coming into existence is a serious harm and that death is (usually) a serious harm. Indeed, some people might think that coming into existence is a serious harm in part because the harm of death is then inevitable. - David Benatar, Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to (More of) My Critics, The Journal of Ethics 2013, 17 (1-2), p. 148 - To procreate is thus to engage in a kind of Russian roulette, but one in which the "gun" is aimed not at oneself but instead at one's offspring. You trigger a new life and thereby subject that new life to the risk of unspeakable suffering. - David Benatar, Debating Procreation: Is It Wrong To Reproduce?, Oxford University Press, New York 2015, p. 65 - Another route to anti-natalism is via what I call a "misanthropic" argument. According to this argument humans are a deeply flawed and a destructive species that is responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence. - David Benatar, "We Are Creatures That Should Not Exist": The Theory of Anti-Natalism, The Critique, July 15, 2015 - Bernhard Thomas Quotes: Even at the risk of being thought mad, we must not be afraid to say that our parents, like theirs before them, were guilty of the crime of procreation, which means the crime of creating unhappiness, of conspiring with others to increase the unhappiness of an increasingly unhappy world. - Thomas Bernhard, Gathering evidence: a memoir, Knopf, New York 1985 (1981), p. 113 - There are absolutely no parents; there are only criminals who are progenitors of new human beings, whose procreative act with all its absurdity and stupidity is directed against those who are created. - Thomas Bernhard, Gathering evidence: a memoir, Knopf, New York 1985 (1981) - People who make a new person are taking an extraordinary responsibility upon themselves. All unrealizable. Hopeless. It's a great crime to create a person, when you know he'll be unhappy, certainly if there's any unhappiness about. The unhappiness that exists momentarily is the whole of unhappiness. To beget, because one wants no longer to be alone, another aloneness; this is criminal. The drive of nature is criminal, and to appeal to it is a pretext, just as everything people do is a pretext. - Maler Strauch - Thomas Bernhard, Frost, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1963 - Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with. - Rudolf - Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, Faber & Faber, London 2013 (1982) - Bleibohm Gunter Books about antinatalism: Fluch der Geburt – Thesen einer Uberlebensethik, Edition Gegensich, Landau-Godramstein 2011 (German language) Quotes: Everyone who's been born is subject to the dictate of birth. A creator, be it "God" or the parents, "bestow" life: without regard for the presentee's inability to accept, or for that he'd be no less poor without this "gift" and that the presentees didn't exist as they received the gift, and thus had no chance to refuse or reject it. The creation of a new creature is indisputably an act of caprice, since the creation leads to a forced deportation of the creature into life or, to stick to Heidegger's words, the creature is "thrown" into life. But for that matter, rather than getting thrown into life, the creature is forced to enter life, it is dragged, innocently condemned to live. As such every life starts with a violation of the newborn's will. This tragedy with comedic qualities is described by Leo Tolstoy in a benign way, when he says: "my life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me." - Gunter Bleibohm, Fluch der Geburt Thesen einer Uberlebensethik, Gegensich, LandauGodramstein 2011 - Bogomil, Bogomils Quotes: However, one heretical doctrine mentioned by Theophylact is of a non-Paulician origin: the heretics, he writes, reject lawful marriage and maintain that the reproduction of the human species is a law of the demon. This exaggerated and distorted asceticism, essentially characteristic of Bogomilism, is a logical consequence of metaphysical dualism, according to which Matter, the product of the Evil Principle, is a source of limitation and suffering for the divinely created soul; hence marriage, as the means of reproduction of Matter, is to be condemned and avoided. - Dimitri Obolensky, The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism, Cambridge University Press, New York 2004, p. 114 - Since sexual reproduction perpetuated the prison of the soul, ascetic life was viewed as a key to salvation. - Florin Curta, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1250, Cambridge University Press, New York 2006, p. 236 - They rejected procreation and marriage; they despised work, riches, honours, social distinctions. - Jacques Lacarriere, The Gnostics, Owen, London 1977, p. 116 - The ultimate aim of the Bogomil believer was to unite with Christ, the good god. To do this he or she must lead an ascetic lifestyle, be vegetarian, and not indulge in wine, sex, marriage, or procreation. It is interesting to note that the English term "bugger," meaning "sodomy, anal or oral intercourse" is derived from Bulgarus, Bulgar. This is because the Bogomil heresy, with its prohibition against procreation, was so widespread among these people in the Middle Ages they became identified with such practices! - Stephen E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies, Simon and Schuste, 2012 - Since created matter is evil, the Bogomils wanted nothing to do with it. They therefore rejected marriage and sexual activity, for sex leads only to the procreation of more evil bodies, and for the Bogomils, children were the production of Satan. - David N. Bell, Terryl Nancy Kinder, Many mansions: an introduction to the development and diversity of medieval theology west and east, Cistercian Publications, 1996, p. 126 - Marriage and procreation, which could lead only to the production of yet more matter, were abhorred within this view, along with meat, wine, churches, and any form of church hierarchy. - Jim Hicks, Cosmic Duality, Time-Life, Incorporated, 1991, p. 32 - Borborites -> Phibionites Brach-Czaina Jolanta Quotes: The formula of childbirth is: let the current state of affairs continue. Unbelievable message. "Forget about suffering, stop rebelling." This means acceptance of everything that happens, suggests that existence has an indisputable value. It also turns out that existence is not as independent of our will as we might think, but we are the ones who make the final gesture of consent. And therefore, we are responsible. - Jolanta Brach-Czaina, Szczeliny istnienia, Wydawnictwo eFKa, Krakow 1999, p. 48 - Brune Elisa Quotes: Procreation is something impossible for me. I would never forgive myself put someone on death row. - Elisa Brune, La mort dans l'ame: tango avec Cioran, Odile Jacob, Paris 2011 - Buddha Siddhartha Gautama Quotes: Now this, monks, is the noble truth of dukkha: birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, & despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha. And this, monks is the noble truth of the origination of dukkha: the craving that makes for further becoming accompanied by passion & delight, relishing now here & now there i.e., craving for sensual pleasure, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. And this, monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of dukkha: the remainderless fading & cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, & letting go of that very craving. And this, monks, is the noble truth of the way of practice leading to the cessation of dukkha: precisely this Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. - Four Noble Truths - From Ignorance spring the samkharas, from the samkharas springs Consciousness, from Consciousness spring Name-and-Form, from Name-and-Form spring the six Provinces, from the six Provinces springs Contact, from Contact springs Sensation, from Sensation springs Thirst (or Desire), from Thirst springs Attachment, from Attachment springs Existence, from Existence springs Birth, from Birth spring Old Age and Death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection, and despair. Such is the origination of this whole mass of suffering. Again, by the destruction of Ignorance, which consists in the complete absence of lust, the samkharas are destroyed, by the destruction of the samkharas Consciousness is destroyed, by the destruction of Consciousness Name-and-Form are destroyed, by the destruction of Name-and-Form the six Provinces are destroyed, by the destruction of the six Provinces Contact is destroyed, by the destruction of Contact Sensation is destroyed, by the destruction of Sensation Thirst is destroyed, by the destruction of Thirst Attachment is destroyed, by the destruction of Attachment Existence is destroyed, by the destruction of Existence Birth is destroyed, by the destruction of Birth Old Age and Death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection, and despair are destroyed. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering. - Mahavagga - Quotes about Siddhartha Gautama Buddha: Buddh states his propositions in the pedantic style of his age. He throws them into a form of Sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death. If he would only realize what suffering he would add to by his act, he would desist from the procreation of children; and so stop the operation of old age and death. - Hari Singh Gour, The Spirit of Buddhism, Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, Montana 2005 (1929), pp. 286-288 - Byron George Quotes: To give birth to those Who can but suffer many years, and die, Methinks is merely propagating death, And multiplying murder. - Cain - George Byron, Cain, Cain and Other Shorter Works, Wildside Press LLC, 2008 (1821), p. 48 - Cabrera Julio Books about antinatalism: Projeto de etica negativa, Edicoes Mandacaru, Sao Paolo 1989 (Portuguese language), second edition: A Etica e Suas Negacoes, Nao nascer, suicidio e pequenos assassinatos, Rocco, Rio De Janeiro 2011 (Portuguese language) Critica de La Moral Afirmativa: Una Reflexion Sobre Nacimiento, Muerte y Valor de La Vida, Gedisa Editorial, Barcelona 1996 (Spanish language), English version: A critique of affirmative morality a reflection on death, birth and the value of life, Brasilia: Julio Cabrera Editions, 2014 Etica Negativa: problemas e discussoes, UFG, Goiania 2008 (Portuguese language) Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, LGE Editora, Brasilia 2009, co-author with Thiago Lenharo di Santis (Portuguese language) Mal-estar e moralidade: situação humana, ética e procriação responsável, Brasília: UNB, 2018 (Portuguese language) Articles about antinatalism: O que e realmente etica negativa. Clarificacoes e novos pensamentos, Poliedro. Phases of philosophy, Publit Publisher, Rio de Janeiro 2006 (Portuguese language) Etica e condicao humana: notas para uma fundamentacao natural da moral, in: A. Naves, Etica: questoes de fundamentacao, Brasilia: UNB, 2007 (Portuguese language) A etica negativa diante do culturalismo, Revista Estudos Filosoficos, n. 7, Sao Joao del-Rei 2011, pp. 399-417 (Portuguese language) Impossibilidades da moral: filosofia da existencia, naturalismo e etica negativa, Filosofia Unisinos 13, Oct 2012, pp. 296-310 (Portuguese language) Quotes: Murdering someone and giving birth to someone are two acts of violence through which, magically, man tries to put themself in God’s place. The victim of a murder is always helpless, but never as helpless as the victim of a birth. Childbirth spills innocent blood just like murder. When procreation is a free choice, then fundamentally life is unnecessary pain. - Julio Cabrera, Projeto de Etica Negativa, Edicoes Mandacaru, Sao Paolo 1989, back cover - If liberty, according to traditional morality itself, is a fundamental ethical value, the very basis of ethics, one must admit that the creation of a child can be the first huge disrespect of the liberty of the human person. The issue of liberty suffers from the same problem as the issue of pain: it is a matter of ethical value that the traditional affirmative ethic is unable to radicalize. - Julio Cabrera, Projeto de Etica Negativa, Edicoes Mandacaru, Sao Paolo 1989, p. 28 - In the light of natural ontology, it is not correct the argument that we do not know anything about our possible offsprings, for example, about the capacity they will have to overcome structural pain; because even we do not know, for example, whether they will enjoy traveling, working or studying classical languages, we do know they will be indigent, decadent, vacating beings who will start dying since birth, who will face and be characterized by systematic dysfunctions, who will have to constitute their own beings as beings-against-the-others in the sense of dealing with aggressiveness and having to discharge it over others who will lose those they love and be lost by those who love them, and time will take everything they manage to build. - Julio Cabrera, A critique of affirmative morality a reflection on death, birth and the value of life, Julio Cabrera Editions, Brasilia 2014 - ''I sent him there because I know he is strong and he will manage well." The ''strengths'' of the newborn do not relieve in anything the moral responsibility of the procreator. Anyone would answer: "This is irrelevant. Your role in the matter consisted of sending people to a situation you know was difficult and painful and you could avoid it. Your predictions about their reacting manners do not decrease in anything your responsibility." In the case of procreation, the reasoning could be the same, and in a notorious emphatic way, since in any intra-worldly situation with already existing people in which we send someone to a position known as painful, the other one could always run away from pain to the extent his being is already in the world and he could predict danger and try to avoid being exposed to a disregarding and manipulative maneuver. In the case of the one who is being born, by contrast, this is not possible at all because it is precisely his very being that is being manufactured and used. Concerning birth, therefore, manipulation seems to be total. - Julio Cabrera, A critique of affirmative morality a reflection on death, birth and the value of life, Julio Cabrera Editions, Brasilia 2014 - Thus, whoever has said to procreate for love, as others kill for hate, might have said a truth, but, no doubt, this person has not given any moral justification for procreation. Saying you have had a child "for love" is a manner of saying you have had him or her compulsively, according to the wild rhythms of life. In a similar way, we might intensely love our parents and, at the same time, consider fatherhood ethically-rationally problematic, and visualize we have been manipulated by them. I may continue to love after having detected immorality, there is nothing contradictory on that. Neither would morally justify a homicide saying we have done it for hate, nor a suicide saying we have done it "for hate against ourselves". Something can continue to be ethically problematic even when guided by love. - Julio Cabrera, A critique of affirmative morality a reflection on death, birth and the value of life, Julio Cabrera Editions, Brasilia 2014 - The best would have been not to be born. Not being born is, in a negative ethics, the absolute good; but it is, precisely, the good that cannot be sought. (Attention: the situation is more radical than in the case of goods that can be sought but never achieved; not being born cannot even be sought). - Julio Cabrera, A critique of affirmative morality a reflection on death, birth and the value of life, Julio Cabrera Editions, Brasilia 2014 - To facilitate the reading of the following text, I present here a brief summary of the three lines: (1) To challenge the usual idea that when giving birth to someone, we are giving something "valuable"; (2) To point to the inevitable "manipulation" of the very act of procreation; (3) To problematize the idea that, if someone could opine, they would ask to be born. Each of the three sections of my work deals with one of these lines. In them we already see what we can understand here by "morality", according to which it is not correct: (1) to give someone something that we consider to be disvaluable; (2) manipulate them; (3) disrespect their autonomy. I believe these three things happen when we procreate. This philosophical result may lead many people to either extend their moral scruples beyond the usual, or to expose clearly and without hypocrisy how little scrupulous they are willing to be, Or it could lead to a refutation by the absurdity of their own moral worldview. - Julio Cabrera, Thiago Lenharo di Santis, Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, LGE Editora, Brasilia 2009, pp. 23-24 - Would a genuinely rational agent choose to be born? My argument against R. M. Hare can be reread in the "Critique of Affirmative Morality" (...). There I suggest that in the experiment where the non-being is magically consulted about their possible birth, Hare is mistaken in assuming uncritically that "they" would undoubtedly choose to be born. (This is the usual affirmative trend). Let's suppose that they is human, that is, a rational creature capable of pondering reasons. The information that is given to this possible being in Hare's experiment is incomplete and biased. We should also tell them that if they is born, they will have no guarantee of being born without problems; that if they manages to be born without problems, they will almost surely suffer from many intra-wordly evils; that if they manages to get rid of them (and this is intra-wordly possible, even if difficult), we can not give them any guarantee as to the length of their life or the type of death they will have, as well as having to suffer the death of those they comes to love and to have their death suffered by those who love them (if they is lucky enough to love someone and to be loved by someone else, which is also not guaranteed). They must be told that if they avoid some violent accidental death, they will decay in a rather scarce number of years (as well as the people they love and care for), and that they have a high chance of becoming a terminal patient that can suffer terribly until the time of their demise. If it is still possible for the non-being, after having assimilated all this information, to choose to be born, could we not nourish wellfounded doubts about its quality as a "rational agent"? - Julio Cabrera, Thiago Lenharo di Santis, Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, pp. 70-71 - Philosophers have always spoken of life as a "preparation for death", and of philosophy as a "learning to die". But there is a wisdom before this: to learn to abstain. To not put anyone in the situation of having to learn to die. - Julio Cabrera, Thiago Lenharo di Santis, Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, p. 79 - MV says that the rejection of life appears in later states, but that at the time of birth, and already before, everything is acceptance of life. But, is this so?? What can be said of the outcry with which children are born, of the primordial cry, of the first traumatic contact (studied by Freud) with the world? Is not the child’s outcry already his first philosophical opinion of the world? Why is not he born laughing, or at least calm? When the baby is dumped in the world at the time of childbirth, his first reaction is pessimistic, a protest against disregard and disturbance, an initial outcry that he did not have to learn, as he will have to learn to laugh in the first few weeks or even months of life (which already marks, in the very inaugural act of being, the pessimistic asymmetry: the baby learns to laugh, but is born crying); the baby is born, forced by foreign desires, in an initial desperation, in a cry of deep and abysmal helplessness, in a primordial terror that, immediately, through movements, caresses, cares, etc, adults will try to soften; movements that will be repeated throughout his life: initial despair followed by protective cares; but the cares are posterior to the despair; the despair comes first, and the cares are the reactions. They are not on the same level. Asymmetry! - Julio Cabrera, Acerca da superioridade intelectual e existencial do pessimismo sobre o otimismo (replica a Marcus Valério) - Small children continue to cry a lot for several years; they weep and weep permanently; they may bother us often, but they are right and we must accept their tears as a perfectly fair reaction to what has been done with them; some weep until well advanced ages, until finding other forms of protest and manifestation of the suffering; even as adults, we continue to cry in a variety of ways. - Julio Cabrera, Acerca da superioridade intelectual e existencial do pessimismo sobre o otimismo (replica a Marcus Valério) - The parent knows perfectly well that they are giving a product of dubious quality only for their own accomplishment and happiness; in admitting that the person may want to return it, they themselves fully understand the dubious character of the gift. - Julio Cabrera, Acerca da superioridade intelectual e existencial do pessimismo sobre o otimismo (replica a Marcus Valério) - Calderon Pedro Quotes: Why haveI provoked thy scorn By the crime of being born? Though for being born I feel Heaven with me must harshly deal Since man's greatest crime on earth Is the fatal fact of birth - Pedro Calderon, Life is a dream, The Floating Press, Auckland 2009 (1635), p. 26 - Cancian Andre Quotes: When we give up on having children, we give up a small and dubious personal satisfaction to prevent the emergence of great suffering. If we can exercise a minimum of compassion for what, according to ourselves, will be the sole object of our love and dedication, we will see that, by not reproducing, we will be putting into practice the only possible kindness toward our children. Let us be comforted to know that, because they were not born, in our dreams they will always be sleeping in their rooms, under blankets as soft as the embrace of the one whose love would never allow them to suffer, and thereby protected them from existence. They remain comfortable, serene, in peace, with a half-smile on their lips for never having tasted the bitterness and disappointment of life. They will always remain pure, eternally free from the dangers of the world. This is the true meaning of giving up one's life in favor of one's children. - Andre Cancian, O Vazio da Maquina: Niilismo e outros abismos, Edicao do autor, 2009 - Undoubtedly, the reproductive drive has deep biological roots, but that does not free us from guilt either. Of course, it was not us who invented life and its rules, but it was us who propagated it. We intentionally create a life in circumstances where we knew that suffering would be unavoidable. The impulse of aggression often leads us to commit crimes, but we do not fail to consider it reprehensible. It is something equally instinctive and natural, rooted in us as deeply as the sexual impulse. The difference is that our aggression will materialize nine months later, as if planting a time bomb in the heart of nothingness. - Andre Cancian, O Vazio da Maquina: Niilismo e outros abismos, Edicao do autor, 2009 - Casanova Giacomo Quotes: Very good and deep is the thought: "Nobody would accept life as a gift if they could decide." Seneca was the one who said it and I am in agreement with him. Imagine a pre existent soul, in all it's tranquility, which is informed of what the life of man entails and the evils to which they is subject it would refuse to enter a body. - Giacomo Casanova, Dialogues sur le suicide - Cassianus Julius Quotes: The first is a dialogue between Jesus and Salome. She asks, "How long shall men die?" Jesus answers, "As long as you women bear children." Writers like Julius Cassianus take this as an implicit injunction to defeat death by ceasing from procreation. - John T. Noonan Jr., Contraception; a history of its treatment by the Catholic theologians and canonists, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2012, p. 61 - Cathars Quotes about Cathars: The doctrine of Catharism opposed sexual intercourse that led to procreation because it was thought that "the devil had given seed to the children of the world". - Margot Joan Fromer, Ethical issues in sexuality and reproduction, Mosby, St. Louis 1983, p. 110 - The Cathars believed the whole of humanity, and each man individually for the children of Satan. Why, then, would serve their reproduction, if not duplication of suffering, and therefore the triumph of Satan. - Katarzyna Skrzypiec, Sekretna wieczerza, czyli o heretykach budzacych sympatie, Mowia Wieki 2009, nr 4 - Adam was created male, since Eve was made afterward as his "woman associate." Lucifer, concerned to undo the damage caused by the creation of humankind, ordered them not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good, which meant not to "commingle themselves," but the devil in the form of the great dragon made them to do so. Procreation was not their choice but part of the diabolic plot; they were moved not by lust but by an outside agency, the devil's orders. - Carol Lansing, Power & Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 111 - The Cathars held that human spirits were imprisoned in flesh, and for them the greatest sin was procreation, imprisoning another spirit in the material world. - Edward Peters, Prentice-Hall, Europe: the world of the Middle Ages, 1977, p. 409 - Procreation only continued material pollution, and thus those who engaged in sex ought to avoid procreation. Though high-ranking Cathars were celibate, others would engage in nonprocreative sex. Guibert de Nogent reported: "Men are known to lie with men, women with women." - Vanessa Baird, The No-nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity, Verso, 2001, p. 55 - Regarding sexual intercourse, their position was that any form of intercourse was acceptable (and, according to some, celebrated), so long as it did not result in procreation. - John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 113 - Ceronetti Guido Quotes: Man dares to allow himself to be cruel, when he's already committed, tranquilly and repeatedly, the crudest act of all: engendering, condemning beings that do not exist or suffer to the horrors of life. - Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York 1993 (1979) - The immorality of procreation praised as conscious is this: here the crime of making a man, to introduce more evil and pain in the world is not made unconsciously in ecstasy and drama in the darkness of copulation, but is coolly premeditated, people then are no longer cautious and repeat the act until they reach the goal. But there is something even worse: artificial procreation, semen ice, where without the manipulator and the belly person horrified by what they do, lacks even the delight that is some extenuating circumstance. - Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York 1993 (1979) - As long as they have the wish to kill, they will not lose the lust to procreate. - Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York 1993 (1979) - If evil created the world, good should destroy it. - Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York 1993 (1979) - Oh, the suppliers of live meat to furnaces of pain! - Guido Ceronetti, La carta e stanca: Una scelta, Adelphi, Milano 2000 - If you are a friend of living beings, you must be an enemy of human reproduction. If you love human beings, do not create them. - Guido Ceronetti, Insetti senza frontiere, Adelphi, Milano 2009 - I call myself an "undead from Montsegur". - Guido Ceronetti, ? - Chah Ajahn Quotes: If you're afraid of illnesses, if you are afraid of death, then you should contemplate where they com from? Where do they come from? They arise from birth. So don't be sad when someone dies, it's just nature, and his suffering in this life is over. If you want to be sad, be sad when people are born: Oh. No, they've come again. They're going to suffer and die again! - Ajahn Chah, No Ajahn Chah: Reflections, Coporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation, 1994 - Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other. It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion. I think if you really want to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this? - Ajahn Chah, No Ajahn Chah: Reflections, Coporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation, 1994 - Chowdhury Sayma H. Aticles about antinatalism: To Breed, or Not to Breed?: An Antinatalist Answer to the Question of Animal Welfare, Evolutionary Psychological Science, April 2017 Quotes: We should do what we can to minimize the suffering of those animals already in existence, but we should also consider ending the breeding of captive animals. This will ensure that fewer suffering sentient beings are created, thus decreasing the overall amount of suffering. - Chowdhury Sayma H., Shackelford Todd K., To Breed, or Not to Breed?: An Antinatalist Answer to the Question of Animal Welfare, Evolutionary Psychological Science, April 2017, p. 6 - Cicero Marcus Tullius Quotes: Best by far not to be born, and not to come up against these rocks of life, but, if you are born, is it next best to escape as it were from fire of fortune as quickly as possible. - Cicero, Consolation, 45 BC - de Chateaubriand Francois-Rene Quotes: After the misfortune of being born, I do not know any greater than giving birth. - Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Memoires d'outre-tombe, Première partie, Livre II, Flammarion, Paris 1982 (1848), p. 78 - Cioran Emil Books about antinatalism: The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1976 (1973) Quotes: Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home? - Emil Cioran, Pe culmile disperarii, Fundatia pentru Literatura si Arta Сegele Carol II, Bucuresti 1934 - What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? - Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay, Penguin Books, London 2010 (1949), p. 30 - To procreate is to love the scourge to seek to maintain and to augment it. They were right, those ancient philosophers who identified fire with the principle of the universe, and with desire, for desire burns, devours: annihilates: At once agent and destroyer of beings, it is sombre, it is infernal by essence. - Emil Cioran, The New Gods, University of Chicago, Chicago 2013 (1969), p. 11 - In the Council of 1211 against the Bogomils, those among them were anathematized who held that "woman conceives in her womb by the cooperation of Satan, that Satan abides there upon conception without withdrawing hence until the birth of the child". I dare not suppose that the Devil can be concerned with us to the point of keeping us company for so many months; but I cannot doubt that we have been conceived under his eyes and that he actually attended our beloved begetters. - Emil Cioran, The New Gods, University of Chicago, Chicago 2013 (1969), p. 62 - Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 4 - It is not my beginnings, it is the beginning that matters to me. If I bump into my birth, into a minor obsession, it is because I cannot grapple with the first moment of time. Every individual discomfort leads back, ultimately, to a cosmogonic discomfort, each of our sensation, by which being crept out of somewhere. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 16 - If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 19 - In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth". An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 33 - Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 98 - 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? - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 147 - I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at dose range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs-between a false promise and the end of all promises. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 151 - That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 157 - When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 181 - Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach. - Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Seaver Books, New York 1986 (1973), p. 212 - The only reason why I flatter myself, is that I understood very early, before the age of twenty, that one should not procreate. My disgust towards marriage, family and all social conventions has its source in this. Crime is to transmit one's frailties to someone else, to force someone to experience the same things we are experiencing, to force someone to the Way of the Cross that may be worse than our own. I could never agree to give life to someone who inherits misfortunes and evil. All parents are irresponsible people, or murderers. Procreation should belong only to brutes. Pity makes you not want to be a "progenitor". This is the cruelest word I know. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, p. 125 - If I were a believer, I would be a Cathar. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, p. 155 - Once again, I want to pray, cry, dissolve, be nothing, return to the initial zero from before birth. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, p. 437 - I like to fall asleep, feeling like being absorbed there, as if it was a motherly abyss, being wrapped by the universe from before birth. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, p. 467 - With what I know, with what I feel, I could not give life to someone without falling into a total contradiction with myself, without being intellectually dishonest and without committing a moral crime. It is interesting that this attitude in me is really old, I had it before crystallizing my thoughts on this subject. I started feeling disgust towards procreation very early; it was an answer to my horror; not only: to the horror of life and and the thirst for it. I never accepted sex other than for pleasure. Its proper function always aroused in me an insurmountable aversion. I would never voluntarily agree to take responsibility for life. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, pp. 546-547 - The problem of responsibility would make sense only if we were asked for an opinion before our birth and if we agreed to be the ones we are. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, pp. 571 - Birth - what an exile! - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, p. 786 - With time, I am more and more reconciled with the darkest things (suicide, horror of birth, etc.), lack of bitterness and desolation. They no longer make me sad. I am immersed in the neck in an objective, obvious, impersonal anti-consolation. I am crying with constantly dry eyes. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, p. 788 - It is the stroke of midnight. I feel lonely in the face of despair stronger than me. And again I take refuge in the time before I was born. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, p. 793 - I do not hate life or desire death, I only regret being born. I prefer non-birth from life and death. The bliss of non-birth. The longer I live, the more willingly I give myself to the joy of non-birth. - Emil Cioran, Cahiers, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1997, p. 820 - I have said more than once that one can have a post-sexual vision of the world, the most desperate vision that is possible: the feeling of having invested everything in something that was not worth it. The extraordinary thing is that we are dealing with a reversible infinity. Sexuality is an immense imposture, a gigantic falsehood that invariably renews itself. - Emil Cioran, Entretiens, 1957-1972, Gallimard, Paris 1995 - Clementine Guillaume Quotes: Should be issued a decree abolishing birth, we will all die, then it is a sin to give birth. - Guillaume Clementine, Le petit malheureux, Serpent a plumes, Paris 1999 - Coates Ken -> Mishra Ramesh Cook Douglas Quotes: I really believe anyone thinking even thinking of bringing a child in to the world is coldly considering an act of cruelty. - Stanley Goodspeed - David Weisberg, Douglas Cook, The Rock, 1996 - Contestabile Bruno Articles about antinatalism: The Denial of the World from an Impartial View, Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal, volume 17, issue 1, Taylor and Francis, 2016 Secular Buddhism and Justice, Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Taylor and Francis, 2018 Quotes: In her novel The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. le Guin describes a city where the good fortune of the citizens requires that an innocent child is tortured in a secret place (le Guin 1973). The child stands symbolically for the innocence of extreme sufferers. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas are the people who deny the world. We will associate them with Buddhist monks in this paper, i.e., with childlessness and retreat. The metaphor suggests that individual happiness is ambivalent. The joy of the majority is at the cost of a suffering minority; one is not possible without the other. There is no doubt that the human suffering in this world is caused by procreation, but the relation is indirect. Parents participate in an immensely complex system of interactions and probabilities. Often a contingent event decides who becomes a victim. As a consequence, participants deny the responsibility for the results of the system – a phenomenon which is also known in the context of structural violence (Galtung 1969). If the human race were a sympathetic race, it could walk away from Omelas. - Bruno Contestabile, The Denial of the World from an Impartial View, Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal, volume 17, issue 1, Taylor and Francis, 2016, p. 3 - Buddhists, who strive to leave the cycle of rebirth (samsara) with utmost consequence, like monks and wandering ascetics, adhere to the ethical ideal of childlessness. In genetic terms, the endeavor to leave the cycle of rebirth has the same consequence. - Bruno Contestabile, Secular Buddhism and Justice, Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Taylor and Francis, 2018, p. 6 - Crawford Jim Books about antinatalism: Confessions of an Antinatalist, Nine-Banded Books, Charleston, West Virginia 2010 Quotes: Life is a mixture of good and bad, or so they say. Trouble is, there's no way to determine where a particular life might fall along fortune's spectrum. For every child born into the lap of luxury, there's another born on the point of a knife. There are no guarantees as to what may transpire as the immediate present unfolds into the uncertain future. Things change in an instant. Two things, however, are certain. Everyone will suffer. And everyone will die. Back to where we came from. Knowing this, and understanding full well that any particular life embodies the potential for experiencing extreme pain and unhappiness unceasing in some cases is procreation really worth the risk? - Jim Crawford, Confessions of an Antinatalist, Nine-Banded Books, Charleston, West Virginia 2010, back cover - Crisp Quentin S. Articles about antinatalism: Antinatalism: A Thought Experiment, Living in the future 2014, Issue 2, Apocalypses: End Times Past, Present and Future Quotes: Murder is the curtailing of a life that would have ended anyway; having a child creates a death that would never have been. - Quentin S. Crisp, Antinatalism: A Thought Experiment, Living in the future 2014, Issue 2, Apocalypses: End Times Past, Present and Future - If a child, for whose existence I was responsible, were to ask me why he or she were here, what happens after death, whether I could guarantee he or she would not suffer a fate like that Furuta Junko suffered in 1988/89 (please look it up, as there's no room to describe it), what would I say? To me, the fact I have no answers that would not be guesswork, evasion or dogma indicates that having children is selfish and cruel. - Quentin S. Crisp, Antinatalism: A Thought Experiment, Living in the future 2014, issue 2, Apocalypses: End Times Past, Present and Future - Cynics Quotes: Whoever trusts us will remain single; those who do not trust us will rear children. And if the race of men should cease to exist there would be as much cause for regret as there would be if the flies and wasps should pass away. 47th Cynic epistle (wrongly attributed to Diogenes). Darwesh S'ad Quotes: To spare you all that I have seen, The losses I have sustained, I withstood the human impulse within. - Dalya Cohen-Mor, Fathers and sons in the Arab Middle East, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2013, p. 140 - Dashti Ali Quotes about Ali Dashti: His advocacy of vegetarianism and his attack on men as "meat-eating machines" (mashinha-ye gusht-khvar) are very much in this tenor. So is his rueful description of the killing of a young gazelle, and the struggle the animal puts up against its "murderer" (qatel), at the house of a "hard-hearted" noble, where a reception is being prepared for the following day. Another feature of this self-imposed abstinence is his defense of his unmarried status (as expressed by a misogamist statement and a strong condemnation of procreation): "How lucky is the person who, like myself, has taken up Abu'l-Ala' al-Ma'arri's philosophy and has kept himself clean from the contamination of family ties! - Jutta E. Knorzer, Ali Dashti's Prison Days: Life Under Reza Shah, Mazda Publishers, 1994, p. 90 - He scornfully remarks that the existence of a survival instinct, leading to unconscious procreation in even the lowest forms of animal life, also prompts "that noblest of creation," intelligent and rational homo sapiens, to propagate his own sinful kind. - Jutta E. Knorzer, Ali Dashti's Prison Days: Life Under Reza Shah, Mazda Publishers, 1994, p. 137 - dcrf Quotes: Is there any doubt that the creation was an act of great violence by God our Father against our Mother the abyss? He made the heavens and the earth and in their image we created our world: every victim of a racial lynching, every target of gendered violence, every abject creature crushed under the weight of imperialist oppression is both the prey of children reenacting the cruelty of their Father and a sacrifice to Him, that He might prevail in keeping the night away from the cold harshness of His day. But, despite all the angels of Heaven and all the devils of Hell, we can still hear in the heart of this miserable existence the whispering echoes of Her voice calling us once again to the emptiness and the silence: let us pray, then, that every palace will crumble and every throne will break, and that the sun will grow dim and the moon turn black and the stars fall from the sky. There are no male gods worth our worship; there are no white gods worth our worship; Satan with his promise of strength and fortune and the old gods with their fallen grandeur were nothing but His other faces, and the serpent and the Promethean Lucifer only actors doing His bidding. Let us praise weakness, not strength; confusion, not security; sorrow, not triumph; darkness, not esoteric light; let our hearts belong only to the undoing of the wretched totality of His work and our every yearning to the void, that She might rise again in all of Her sorrow and loss to drown this world in the depth of her tears. - dcrf, Book of Sand official website - Darrow Clarence Quotes: Nowhere in the universe is there evidence of charity, of kindness, of mercy toward beasts or amongst them, and still less consideration amongst men. Man is only a part of nature, and his conduct is not substantially different from that of all animal life. But for man himself there is little joy. Every child that is born upon the earth arrives through the agony of the mother. From childhood on, the life is full of pain and disappointment and sorrow. From beginning to end it is the prey of disease and misery; not a child is born that is not subject to disease. Parents, family, friends, and acquaintances, one after another die, and leave us bereft. The noble and the ignoble life meets the same fate. Nature knows nothing about right and wrong, good and evil, pleasure and pain; she simply acts. She creates a beautiful woman, and places a cancer on her cheek. She may create an idealist, and kill him with a germ. She creates a fine mind, and then burdens it with a deformed body. And she will create a fine body, apparently for no use whatever. She may destroy the most wonderful life when its work has just commenced. She may scatter tubercular germs broadcast throughout the world. She seemingly works with no method, plan or purpose. She knows no mercy nor goodness. Nothing is so cruel and abandoned as Nature. To call her tender or charitable is a travesty upon words and a stultification of intellect. No one can suggest these obvious facts without being told that he is not competent to judge Nature and the God behind Nature. If we must not judge God as evil, then we cannot judge God as good. In all the other affairs of life, man never hesitates to classify and judge, but when it comes to passing on life, and the responsibility of life, he is told that it must be good, although the opinion beggars reason and intelligence and is a denial of both. Emotionally, I shall no doubt act as others do to the last moment of my existence. With my last breath I shall probably try to draw another, but, intellectually, I am satisfied that life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would wantonly inflict on some one else. The strange part of the professional optimist's creed lies in his assertion that if there is no future life then this experience is a martyrdom and a hideous sham. - Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life, Lulu 2015, pp. 385-386 - This great senseless, wasteful, cruel spawning of life upon the earth! I see not only its pain, but its pleasures, and its joys annoy me more than its sorrows, for I don't want to loose them. - Clarence Darrow, Is Life Worth Living?, Haldeman-Julius Co., 1925, p. 62 - David-Neel Alexandra Quotes: A birthday is nothing but the commemoration of the sinister farce our parents put upon us when giving us birth. - Alexandra David-Neel, La Lampe de sagesse, Du Rocher, 2006 - Deschner Karlheinz Quotes: No, I would not like it if there was no end, it is literally something we can influence: a peaceful end to humanity. Let no one – this is the first thing I wish – become a parent anymore. It does not hurt the unborn, and saves them a lot of trouble. - Karlheinz Deschner, Frommer Wunsch. Fur ein friedliches Ende der Menschheit, in: Peter Roos and Friederike Hassauer, Kinderwunsch. Reden und Gegenreden - Deshimaru Taisen Quotes: A young monk had fallen deeply in love with a beautiful damsel. He abandoned the temple in which he lived and went to the village with the intention of declaring his love to her. Since it was already dark by the time he arrived, he checked in an inn and went to rest. That night he dreamt he had married her. He entered her chamber, made love to her... after some time they had twins. When they were thirteen years old, one of them fell into the river and drowned. The father, seized by grief, endlessly cried... and that's how he woke up, filled with tears. By morning, he retraced his steps, and headed back once more to his temple. - Taisen Deshimaru, Historias Zen, Editorial Sirio, Barcelona 2001, p. 130 - Desproges Pierre Quotes: - But if it is not a cancer, how to call this disease? - It's called life. - Life? This means that I ... - You're alive, yes, unfortunately. - But where I could catch this shit? - It is hereditary. I'm not saying this to cheer you up, but it is a very common disease. I'm afraid that it will not be soon defeated. What is needed is mandatory contraception for everyone. However, people are not mature enough. - Pierre Desproges, Vivons heureux en attendant la mort, Seuil, Paris 1998 - Dostoevsky Fyodor Quotes: By the way, here are the thoughts of one person – a materialist, of course who committed suicide out of boredom. In fact, what right did this Nature have to bring me into the world as a result of some eternal law of hers? I was created with consciousness, and I was conscious of this Nature: what right did she have to produce me, a conscious being, without my willing it? A conscious being, and thus a suffering one; but I do not want to suffer, for why would I have agreed to that? Nature, through my consciousness, proclaims to me some sort of harmony of the whole. From this message human consciousness has created religions. Nature tells me – even though I know full well that I cannot participate in the "harmony of the whole" and never will be able to and haven't the least idea what this means in any case that I still ought to submit to this message, to humble myself, to accept suffering in view of the harmony of the whole and agree to live. However, if I am to make a conscious choice, then naturally I would prefer to be happy only during the moment while I exist; but as regards the whole and its harmony, once I have been annihilated, I haven't the least concern if this whole with its harmony remains after I am gone or is annihilated at the same instant as I am. And why should I have to worry so whether it is preserved after I am gone? That is the question. It would have been better had I been created like all animals, that is, as a living being, but without a rational conception ofmyself. My consciousness is certainly not a harmony butjust the opposite, a disharmony, because I am unhappy with it. Just look at those who are happy on earth, look at the sort of people who consent to go on living. It is precisely those people who are like animals and who are most closely akin to those species because of the limited development of their consciousness. They willingly consent to live, but on condition that they live like animals; that is, they eat, drink, sleep, build their nests, and raise their offspring. To eat, drink, and sleep in human fashion means to grow rich and to steal; building a nest above all means to steal. You may object, perhaps, that one can arrange one's life and build one's nest on a rational foundation, on scientifically proven social principles and not by stealing, as was the case heretofore. Granted; but I ask you: what for? What is the point of arranging one's life and expending so much effort to arrange social life correctly, rationally, and in a morally righteous manner? No one, of course, can give me an answer to that. All that anyone could reply is: "In order to derive pleasure." Indeed, if I were a flower or a cow I would derive some pleasure. But continually posing questions to myself, as I do now, I cannot be happy, even with the supreme and direct happiness of love for my neighbor and the love of humanity for me, since I know that tomorrow it will all be annihilated. I, and all this happiness, and all the love, and all of humanity will be transformed into nothing, into the original chaos. And under such a condition I simply cannot accept any happiness not from my refusal to agree to accept it, not from stubbornness based on some principle, but simply because I will not and cannot be happy under the condition of the nothingness that threatens tomorrow. This is a feeling, a direct feeling, and I cannot overcome it. Well, suppose I were to die but humanity were to remain eternal in my place; then, perhaps, I might still find some comfort in it. But our planet, after all, is not eternal, and humanity's allotted span is just such a moment as has been allotted to me. And no matter how rationally, joyously, righteously, and blessedly humanity might organize itself on earth, it will all be equated tomorrow to that same empty zero. Though there may be some reason why this is essential, in accordance with some almighty, eternal, and dead laws of Nature, believe me, this idea shows the most profound disrespect to humanity; it is profoundly insulting to me, and all the the more unbearable becase there is no one here who is to blame. And finally, even if one were to admit the possibility of this fairy tale o fa human society at long last organized on earth on rational and scientifc bases; if one were to believe in this, to believe in the future happiness of people at long last, then the mere thought that some implacable laws of Nature made it essential to torment the human race for a thousand years before allowing it to attain that happiness that thought alone is unbearably loathsome. Now add the fact that this very same Nature, which has permitted humanity at last to attain happiness, tomorrow will find it necessary for some reason to reduce it all to zero, despite the suffering with which humanity has paid for this happiness; and, more important, that Nature does all this without concealing anything from me and my consciousness as she hid things from the cow. In such a case one cannot help but come to the very amusing yet unbearably sad thought: "What if the human race has been placed on the earth as some sort of brazen experiment, simply in order to find out whether such creatures are going to survive here or not?" The sad part of this thought lies mainly in the fact that once again no one is to blame; no one conducted the experiment; there is no one we can curse; it all happened simply due to the dead laws of Nature, which I absolutely cannot comprehend and with which my consciousness is utterly unable to agree. Ergo: Whereas Nature replies through my consciousness to my questions about happiness only by telling me that I can be happy in no other way than through harmony with the whole, which I do not understand and, evidently, never will be capable of understanding: And whereas Nature not only refuses to recognize my right to receive an account from her and indeed refuses to answer me at all, and not because she does not want to answer, but because she cannot answer; And whereas I have become convinced that Nature, in order to answer my questions, has assigned to me (unconsciously) my own self and she answers me through my own consciousness (because I am saying all this to myself); And whereas, finally, under such circumstances I must assume simultaneously the roles of plaintiff and defendant, accused and judge, and find this comedy utterly absurd on Nature's part and even humiliating on my part; Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant,judge and accused, I condemn this Nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering, to annihilation along with me... Since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying only myself, solely out of the weariness of enduring a tyranny in which there in no guilty party. N.N." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, vol 1, The Sentence, Northwestern University Press, 1997, pp. 653-656 - (written from the perspective of a materialist and signed with initials N. N.) - "Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth." Asked Ivan. "No, I wouldn't consent." Said Alyosha softly. - Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, The Macmillan company, New York 1926, p. 258 - Drachline Pierre Quotes: The species proliferates. The most harmful of weeds. And none of the soothing comments of Malthusian prophets will change anything. The limit has been crossed long ago. The toll is dreadful regardless of the actual number displayed on the counter. It's enough to make your head spin. The extinction of the species is the only reasonable perspective. The unattainable dream... - Pierre Drachline, Pour en finir avec l'espece humaine - Druskowitz Helene Quotes: Feminism must be equipped with fire and brilliance. It's the holiest ideal of this time. That the noble natural rights of women have been discovered so late shows a dreadful spotlight on the history of so-called human development. There may appear to be something weird in feminism for the uninitiated, but as soon as we reach that point, philosophy will raise its aristocratic head and say to us: "The new doctrines involves the priesthood of only women, it proves the truth of pessimism and the necessity of worldwide misery in the current system, but not that of an endless continuation of existence." Then, according to the women's higher mission, women will recognize themselves as superior beings, as the priestesses of their race, as natural nobility. Aware of the higher law of life, At that same time, under their perception of the higher law of life, women will become fully aware of their higher purpose, to appear as the leaders towards death, preparing the end of the end. This then becomes the ideal, and take the place of any ideal without end or goal! - Helene Druskowitz, Pessimistische Kardinalsatze: Ein Vademekum fur die freiesten Geister, Herrose Zimsen Verlag, Wittenberg 1905 - Ducharme Rejean Quotes: Giving life, this poison! To bring others into this world, into this mess, one needs to be cynical, evil or stupid! - Rejean Ducharme, L'Oceantume, Gallimard, Paris 1968 - Ecclesiastes Quotes: Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors – and they have no comforter. And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun. - Ecclesiastes, 1:2-4 - Encratites Quotes: For through their abstinence they sin against creaation and the holy Creator, against the sole, almighty God; and they teach that one should not enter into matrimony and beget children, should not bring further unhappy beings into the world, and produce fresh fodder for death. - Clement of Alexandria, Stromata - Young men and women could decide to remain virgins: by passing through puberty without intercourse, they could overcome the sexual temptations to which Adam and Eve had finally succumbed. Young married women could initiate nothing less than a "boycott of the womb"; they could withhold their bodies from sexual intercourse, thereby cheating death of further prey. - Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Columbia University Press, New York 1988, p. 96 - These Alexandrian encratites whom Clement knows additionally argued that death itself was overcome by the believer when he or she gave up procreation. They based their belief on a saying of Jesus from the Gospel of the Egyptians: When Salome asked the Lord, "How long will death hold sway?" he answered, "As long as you women bear children". - April D. De Conick, Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas: A History of the Gospel And Its Growth, T&T Clark Int'l, London 2006, p. 183 - Other groups, like the Encratites, saw procreation asthe diabolically inspired evil that perpetuates our imprisonment within these mortal coils. They argued that total purity would disentangle trapped souls, reuniting them with the light. - Jo Ann McNamara, A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries, Routledge, New York 1985, p. 70 - This attitude of the Encratites is radical: birth implies death, birth causes the extension of the regime of death: only abstention from marriage and procreation could introduce resurrection and life, could hasten resurrection and life. - R. van den Broek, M. J. Vermaseren, Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions Presented to Gilles Quispel on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday (Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance), Brill, Leiden 1997, p. 34 - The Encratites held that procreation is evil, because birth inevitably leads to death. - Gilles Quispel, Gnostica, Judaica, Catholica. Collected Essays of Gilles Quispel, Brill, Leiden 2008, p. 228 - Ettlinger Karl Books about antinatalism: Der erschossene Storch, Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig 1930, novel (German language) Quotes: Jung: "Somewhere on earth certainly still are people who do not know this suicide law extinction." Cassius: "If it is a hope for you, that somewhere people gathering new forces to again tear apart each other in even more bloody wars, so let it, have such hope." (Dialogue between the characters of the novel, Jung, who wakes up after five thousand years of hibernation in a post-apocalyptic world where most people have been murdered with chemical weapon, and Cassius, the leader of the last people, pacifists and vegetarians enjoying life, who decided to resign from procreation, having come to the conclusion that the existence of people always sooner or later is associated with the making of slaughters by them). Euripides Quotes: For mortals it is better not to be born than to be born; Children I bring to birth with bitter pains; And then when I have borne them they lack understanding. In vain I groan, that I must look on wicked offspring. While I lose the good. If the good survive, My wretched heart is melted by alarm. What is this goodness then? Is it not enough That I should care for one alone And bear the pain for this one soul? - Clement Of Alexandria, The Stromata, Book III, Chapter III - So now I think and have long so thought Man ought never children to beget, Seeing into what agonies we are born. - Clement Of Alexandria, The Stromata, Book III, Chapter III - We ought to get together to mourn a person's birth, for all the woes he is getting into. Once he dies and wins release from his troubles, let us take him to the grave with joyful cries of congratulation. - Euripides, Cresphontes - Flammarion Camille Quotes: What will become of me; what will become of us? He repeated, like the constant clashing of a fixed idea in his brain. If we die utterly, what an absurd farce life is, with its hopes and struggles. If we are immortal, what do we do with ourselves through endless eternity? Where shall I be a hundred years from now? Where will all the present dwellers of the earth be? To die, for ever and ever; to have existed but for a moment! What a mockery! Would it not be better a hundred times over never to have been born? But if it be our fate to live eternally and never to be able to change anything of the fatality that carries us along – having endless eternity always before us – how can we bear the burden of such a destiny? Is that the doom awaiting us? If we should tire of existence, we should be forbidden to fly from it; it would be impossible to end it. In this conception there is far more implacable cruelty th in that of an ephemeral life vanishing away insect's flight in the fresh evening breeze. Why then were we born? To suffer uncertainty; to find after examination not a single one of our hope a left; to live like idiots if we do not think, like madmen if we do? - Georges Spero - Camille Flammarion, Urania, C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, Paris 1889 - (I corrected one word in this translation from French to English by Augusta Rice Stetson. She translated the French word "fous" as the English "fools", while the French word "fou" has more to do with madness, insanity and craziness than with foolery.) Flaubert Gustave Quotes: The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence. - Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Madame Louise Colet, 11 December 1852, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, Faber & Faber, London 1979 - He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that's for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I'll be bound you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters? - Gustave Flaubert, November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style, Hesperus, London 2005 (1841), p. 91 - Gandhi Mahatma Quotes: If destruction is violence, creation, too, is violence. Procreation, therefore, involves violence. The creation of what is bound to perish certainly involves violence. - Mahatma Gandhi, Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, volume 32, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, Delhi 1969, p. 359 - Suppose for a moment that all procreation stops, it will only mean that all destruction will cease. Moksha is nothing but release from the cycle of births and deaths. This alone is believed to be the highest bliss, and rightly. - Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, volume 24, New Delhi, Publications Division Government of India, Delhi 1999, p. 369- The ideal brahmachari had not to struggle with sensual desire or desire for procreation; it never troubles him at all. The whole world will be to him one vast family, he will centre all his ambition in relieving the misery of mankind and the desire for procreation will be to him as gall and wormwood. - Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, volume 35, New Delhi, Publications Division Government of India, Delhi 1999, pp. 17-18 - de Giraud Theophile Books about antinatalism: L'art de guillotiner les procreateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste, Le Mort-Qui-Trompe, Nancy 2006 (French language) Quotes: Answer without flinching: if there existed a solution that could abolish the totality of all evils inflicted on disastrous humanity, if it was possible, by some simple remedy, incredibly cheap, immediately accessible, scrupulously inoffensive, of absolute and definitive efficiency, to stop all distress, all cries, all cries of pain, all pathologies, all protests of illbeing, all despair, all cataclysms, all anxiety, all unhappiness, in short all tortures afflicting the human species, would you have the macabre stupidity to reject such a remedy, to disdain such a miracle cure? No, that goes without saying. Well this solution does exist, and the mysterious is thereby delivered to us: it consists simply, in its saintly simplicity, to not procreate - Theophile de Giraud, L'art de guillotiner les procreateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste, Le Mort-Qui-Trompe, Nancy 2006, p. 10 - Significant symbolism: we are all born in filth and suffering, of course in the suffering of our mother, who, however, has no right to complain if it was her choice, but above all in the one we experience, the victims, the unfortunate exiles from emptiness, who being in paradisal pelagic darkness, in which no anxiety reached us, we suddenly start to struggle, terribly squeezed, almost grinded, choking and fainting, because we are forced out through a poor quality birth canal, designed by this incompetent gold hand called Mother Nature. - Theophile de Giraud, L'art de guillotiner les procreateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste, Le Mort-Qui-Trompe, Nancy 2006, pp. 13-14 - Another argument is often made by the irresponsible ones who breed us – that it is an act of "leaving a trace" – strange impulse! Let us immediately observe that from an ethological point of view this is akin to the attitude many mammals have to leave droppings on the ground to mark their path or territory. The dog urinating against a lamp post also leaves a trace, one however which, unlike the baby, benefits from the privilege of not having to endure the grueling stresses of life... - Theophile de Giraud, L'art de guillotiner les procreateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste, Le Mort-Qui-Trompe, Nancy 2006, p. 35 - We procreate sometimes because of a need, sometimes for pleasure. The former is nothing more than slavery, the latter sadism, but whatever the reason, we only procreate from absolute selfishness! The child is never conceived as an end but always as a means, which is purely machiavellian! - Theophile de Giraud, L'art de guillotiner les procreateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste, Le Mort-Qui-Trompe, Nancy 2006, p. 48 - If it was otherwise, if procreation was not the result of the most scandalous narcissism, if our odious parents were really moved by some generosity, prospective adoption candidates would be incredibly more numerous than the millions of children who wait, right now, to be adopted! But talk about adoption and you'll see a big frown of "yes-but-not-for-me" form on their face, greedy to possess a prey coming entirely from their bodies. "Orphans? Someone else's baby? Come on, get scientists to help vanquish my infertility instead!" - Theophile de Giraud, L'art de guillotiner les procreateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste, Le Mort-Qui-Trompe, Nancy 2006, p. 51 - Making others suffer is incompatible with Ethics. To live is to suffer. Therefore to give life is incompatible with Ethics. - Theophile de Giraud, L'art de guillotiner les procreateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste, Le Mort-Qui-Trompe, Nancy 2006, p. 76 - The predispositions and motivations of the obviously noble individuals are assessed, individuals who want, through adoption, to help existing child swim in the hell of existence, but even the most ominous fool, if they only have such a wish, has absolute right, through creation, to immerse them this hell, without having to justify it in any way. - Theophile de Giraud, L'art de guillotiner les procreateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste, Le Mort-Qui-Trompe, Nancy 2006, p. 147 - von Goethe Johannn Wolfgang Quotes: I thank you, Gods, that you decided to annihilate me without children and let me tell you: Don't love the sun and the stars too much, come follow me down into the dark kingdom, come child-free and guilt-free down with me. - Orestes - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, 1779 - And rightly so: since everything created, In turn deserves to be annihilated: Better if nothing came to be. - Mephistopheles - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, Scene 3, 1808 - Goncourt de Edmond and Jules Quotes: How is it that in no epoch of history, in no place on earth, a sect of wise men has been formed with the aim of making human life die out in the face of the cruelty of its evils? Why is it that this end of mankind by abstention from procreation has not been preached? – Or, for the more hasty, by exploring and inventing in public chemistry laboratories possibilities for the most gentle suicide, where a combination of exhilarating gases would be taught that made a bout of laughter out of the transition from being to nonbeing? - Edmond de Goncourt, Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Memoires de la vie litteraire. 1864- 1878. Tome 2, Fasquelle/Flammarion, Paris 1956, p. 504, translated by Karim Akerma - Gonet Krystyna Quotes: Imagine that it's possible. This is what I think. (...) When I was young this I thought and still think to this day, that I do not know how all of it works and where it is leading... what would I tell a child about all this, why was they born and for what purpose? (...) We breed, we give birth without thought. But then, when the child says: I never asked for this – we find ourselves bereft of answers. A multitude of misfortunes are happening on earth, life is a great risk, it often hurts terribly... So take responsiblity, bring someone into the world, "bestow" life? - Krystyna Gonet, Jak by to powiedziec.. Rozmowy z Krystianem Lupa (answer to Krystian Lupa's question "Is it possible to think that we should not give birth to children at all, because the meaning of life is not certain?") - Grabowski Zbigniew Quotes: Didn't Conrad, in his great novel "Heart of Darkness", had this feeling of deathbed despair, when he mentions Kurz's doubtful fight with death – fight without confidence? Same Conrad, who put in one of his novels Calderon's words, that the biggest misfortune of man is to be born, as a tagline? This coincides with your repeatedly spoken thesis, that the biggest iniquity is to bring children to life, because giving them birth is sentencing them to death. We are pulling them out from the nothingness, from the state of complete unconsciousness into reality – and then we command them to undergo the agony of death, which they wouldn't have to experience without being alive in the first place. - Zbigniew Grabowski, Rozmowy z Toba, Oficyna Poet i Malarzy, Londyn 1974, p. 151,  words addressed to one of the interlocutors of the author, not mentioned by name or surname - Do we have the right through procreation condemn our children to death? - Zbigniew Grabowski, Rozmowy z Tobｹ, Oficyna Poet i Malarzy, Londyn 1974, p. 151 -  Greek Gospel of the Egyptians Quotes: Salome: "How long shall men die?" Jesus Christ: "As long as you women bear children." Salome: "I have done well, then, in not bearing children?" Jesus Christ: "Every plant eat thou, but that which hath bitterness eat not. I have come to destroy the works of the female." Gregor of Nyssa Quotes: For the bodily procreation of children (let no one be displayed by this argument) is more an embarking upon death that upon life for man. Corruption has its beginning in birth and those who refrain from procreation through virginity themselves bring about a cancellation of death by preventing it from advancing further because of them, and, by setting themselves up as a kind of boundary stone between life and death, they keep death from going forward. - Ascetical Works (The Fathers of the Church, volume 58), The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C. 2010, p. 48 - Haniya Yutaka Quotes about Yutaka Haniya: He believed that the most conscious actions that man can act upon are two things: suicide and desisting procreation. - 無限の相のもとに, Heibonsha, Tokyo 1997, p. 196 - Hardy Thomas Quotes: For instance, people call me a pessimist; and if it is pessimism to think, with Sophocles, that's not to have been born is best,' then I do not reject the designation. - Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections, Springer, New York 2016, p. 70 - Harrison Gerald Articles about antinatalism: Better Not to Have Children, Think 2011, volume 10, issue 27, pp. 113-121 Antinatalism, Asymmetry, and an Ethic of Prima Facie Duties, 2012, South African Journal of Philosophy 2012, volume 31, number 1, pages 94-103 Quotes: It might be pointed out that we cannot gain someone's consent to exist; we cannot gain their consent before they exist and by the time they exist it's too late. But the fact that we cannot gain their consent does not mean that we are free to do without it. Suppose you wish to torture someone against their will, you cannot seek your victim's consent – the torture would not then be against their will. It would be absurd to argue that for this reason we are permitted to torture people against their will. Similarly, the fact that prospective parents cannot get the consent of those they plan to bring into existence doesn't magically mean it's OK. Quite the opposite – if you can't get the consent of the person you're going to significantly affect by your action, then the default position is that you don't do whatever it is that's going to affect them. There are exceptions. Pushing someone out of the way of a falling piano is morally right even if no prior consent can be given (if, for instance, there isn't time). But in this kind of case you are preventing someone from coming to great harm. To procreate – to subject someone to a life – does not prevent them coming to harm. Not being created cannot harm them because they don't exist. - Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner, Better Not To Have Children, Think 2011, volume 10, issue 27, pp. 117-118 - Humans are the most destructive creatures on the planet. We cause vast numbers of animal deaths (both directly and indirectly). We destroy habitats. We damage the environment. We are currently heating up the world's climate in a way that is likely to be detrimental to countless numbers of animals (ourselves included). And we have the means, nuclear weapons, to destroy everything at the push of a button. We came perilously close to pushing that button on one occasion (the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962). The best way to stop the destruction is to remove the destructive force; to remove humans by refraining from procreation. In short, the colossal amount of harm caused by humans gives us a moral reason to boycott the human species. - Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner, Better Not To Have Children, Think 2011, volume 10, issue 27, p. 113 - It therefore seems there are at least two prima facie duties that push towards making procreative acts wrong overall: our prima facie duty to prevent pain and our prima facie duty not to seriously affect someone else without his prior consent. Other things being equal, these generate a duty not to procreate. - Gerald Harrison, Antinatalism, Asymmetry, and an Ethic of Prima Facie Duties, South African Journal of Philosophy 2012, volume 31, number 1, pp. 94-103 - Hayry Matti Articles about antinatalism: A rational cure for prereproductive stress syndrome, Journal Of Medical Ethics 2004, 30(4), pp. 377-378 If you must make babies, then at least make the best babies you can?, Human Fertility, 7, 2004, pp. 105-112 The rational cure for prereproductive stress syndrome revisited, Journal Of Medical Ethics 2005, 31(10), pp. 606-607 An Analysis of Some Arguments for and against Human Reproduction, Arguments and Analysis in Bioethics, Editions Rodopi B. V., Amsterdam-New York 2010, pp. 171-174. Quotes: I believe it is morally wrong to cause avoidable suffering to other people. This belief gives rise to two different objections to human reproduction. On the one hand, since all human beings suffer at some point in their lives, every parent who could have declined to procreate is to blame. On the other hand, since potential parents cannot guarantee that the lives of their children will be better than non-existence, they can also be rightfully accused of gambling on other people's lives, whatever the outcome. Because of the uncertainties of human life, anybody's children can end up arguing that it would have been better for them not to have been born at all. - Matti Hayry, The rational cure for prereproductive stress syndrome, Journal Of Medical Ethics 2004, 30(4), p. 378 - If it is irrational to allow the worst outcome of our actions, and if it is immoral to cause suffering, then it is irrational and immoral to have children. - Matti Hayry, The rational cure for prereproductive stress syndrome revisited, Journal Of Medical Ethics 2005, 31(10), p. 606 - Heine Heinrich Quotes: Sleep is good: and Death is better, yet. Surely never to have been born is best. - Heinrich Heine, Morphine, 1856 - Hicks Bill Quotes: Wouldn't it be nice to have a kid, to have this fresh, clean slate, which we could fill, and a little clean spirit, totally, you know, innocent, and to fill it with good ideas. Yeah, yeah, how about this? If you're so fucking altruistic, why don't you leave the little clean spirit wherever it is right now? Ok? Horrible act, childbirth. It's a nightmare. Bringing – I would never bring a kid to this fucking planet. - Bill Hicks, Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, Constable & Robinson Limited, London 2004, p. 164 - Horstmann Ulrich Quotes: I respect the deserters and solidarize myself with the forcibly recruited. (About suicide and procreation.) - Rolf Lochel, Wir bewohnen einen Hinterhof – Ein Interview mit Ulrich Horstmann, literaturkritik.de nr 11, November 1999 - Huxley Aldous Quotes: They were good Buddhists, and every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven's sake don't go about putting superfluous victims on the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphysical sense. - Ranga - Aldous Huxley, Island, Harper and brothers, 1962, p. 98 - Hwang Jiwoon Books about antinatalism: Procreation Is Murder: The Case for Voluntary Human Extinction, Amazon Digital Services, 2017 Quotes: Lack of capacity to give consent do not mean somebody can inflict any action to the person that lacks the capacity to give informed consent. For example, minor under age of consent deemed to lack the capacity to give consent, so any sexual contact with such minor is deemed rape unconditionally (statutory rape). Even though for example, medical treatment, vaccination, and compulsory education are inflicted without the informed consent of the child, such action is deemed to be (whether real or purported) best interest of the child to be justifiable. For procreation, the child neither given consent thereto nor have any interest to come into existence, although once came into existence, the child may have the interest to continue their existence. - Jiwoon Hwang, Procreation Is Murder: The Case for Voluntary Human Extinction, Amazon Digital Services, 2017, p. 3 - Ionesco Eugene Quotes: If misfortune of birth happens to someone, someone should at least get a consolation: life successful and comfortable. - Eugene Ionesco, Present passe, passe present, Mercure de France, Paris 1968 - Two things are unacceptable: birth and death. I did not ask for them and I do not accept them. - Eugene Ionesco, Un homme en question, Gallimard, Paris 1979, p. 24 - Jaccard Roland Quotes: What is good in journey from the womb to the tomb? - Roland Jaccard, L'ame est un vaste pays, Grasset, Paris 1984 - We should never forget that the Earth is in fact one large penal colony. For what crimes we were sent here? And when it comes to the vase of lamentations, it tumble only pools of uselessness. - Roland Jaccard, L'ame est un vaste pays, Grasset, Paris 1984 - When life failed our expectations, when we gave up the creation of ourselves, when we sense that everything is in ruins then instead of going to the mortuary we lead the family and relatives to the place even more grave and kitschy place: to the maternity ward. - Roland Jaccard, La tenstation nihiliste, Latulu, Besançon 1989 - We should refrain from denying Schopenhauer, who claimed that immediately after the act of love we can hear the devil's laughter. - Roland Jaccard, Le rire du diable, Zulma, Cadeilhan 1994 - What could be more obscene than a woman proudly carrying in her belly a future corpse? - Roland Jaccard, Topologie du pessimisme, Zulma, Cadeilhan 1997 - Causing the birth of a child means abusing this child. At the mere idea that they could give life, every wise man thinks that he would prefer to die. - Roland Jaccard, Un climatiseur en enfer, Editions Zoe, Geneve 2000 - How can anyone take seriously a insane idea that the world was created by a good God, and sign up under the most criminal of all imperatives: "be fruitful and multiply"? - Roland Jaccard, Sexe et sarcasmes, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2009 - Giving life is an evil act, even criminal. - Isabelle Hachey, La Presse, Pourquoi fait-on des enfants?, 17.10.2009 - Jahnn Hans Henny Quotes about Hans Henny Jahnn: Jahnn's work differs because of his abstract, theoretical rejection of the process of procreation, pregnancy, the cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction in the universe. - Thomas Freeman, The Case of Hans Henny Jahnn: Criticism and the Literary Outsider, Camden House, Rochester 2001, p. 128 - Jastrun Mieczyslaw Quotes: Never, at any point in life, I could get rid of the notion that this type of ending to life, which brings death, is an absurdity, unendurable without the smokescreen of one or another myth, delusions that goes beyond the bounderies of our biological being, which is a seasonal being, bounded by space and time, comprehended only in these catagories, which doesn't signify we must understand precisely this form of being as the existence and non-existence, reasonable, righteous, the only one we can think of, because necessary. Inevitability does not mean a wise solution. Before everything it deprives us of freedom. Since the earliest years of consciousness, we are determined, we know about it, at any time we are in danger, never safe. Does existence in the vastness of the universe have to be connected with constant risk, does it have to be like a house, where tenancy agreement can be terminated at any time, can't we think about existence based on more premanent foundations, less limited, having knowledge about something much wiser? That kind of thoughts of a rational being are based on the common logic of thinking, they do not take into account another possibility, that being shouldn't be considered in the category of logic and necessity, but it can be considered in the categories of absurd, lack of logic and hostile necessity. The difficultly of accepting death does not have to result in an attachment to life, from a deficiency so great that a being already brought into existence, would like to live forever or not be born at all. However, this is not senseless thinking, on the contrary, this seems much more sensible than all this huge preparation for a short life. A rational being – it may seem so to us – should have the right to choose death, but should not be submitted to a determined death sentence, should not be a convict. - Mieczyslaw Jastrun, Wolnosc wyboru, Wolnosc wyboru, Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1969, p. 11 - Jeremiah Quotes: Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, "A child is born to you a son!" May that man be like the towns the LORD overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame? - Jeremiah 20:14-18 - Job Quotes: And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night [in which] it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. As [for] that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning. Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but [have] none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: Because it shut not up the doors of my [mother's] womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes. Why died I not from the womb? [why] did I [not] give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck? For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest, With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver: Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants [which] never saw light. - Job, 3:2-16 - Kerouac Jack Quotes: Let us cease bestiality and go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death. Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this. I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death. - Jack Kerouac, Some of the Dharma, Penguin Books, London 1999 (1997), p. 175 - I will have to preach the only possible truth: The abolishing of death by extermination of birth. Life control. Put an end to human rebirth, by abstaining from sexual intercourse. Everybody stop breeding, or by method of-birth-control stop birth. At the same time, stop killing for sport or for eating living beings; they tremble at punishment and death too. Everybody live off vegetables and synthetic foods, causing no pain anywhere. - Jack Kerouac, Some of the Dharma, Penguin Books, London 1999 (1997), p. 338 - Maybe rebirth is simply HAVING KIDS. - Jack Kerouac, Selected letters, 1957-1969, volume 2, Viking, New York 1999, p. 206, letter to Philip Whalen (about Buddhism) - I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. "Pretty girls make graves", was my saying, whenever I'd had to turn my head around involuntarily to stare at the incomparable pretties of Indian Mexico. - Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, Penguin Books, London 1976, p. 29 - Birth is the direct cause of all pain and death, and a Buddha dying of dysentery at the age of eighty-three had only to say, finally, "Be ye lamps unto thyselves" last words "work out thy salvation with diligence", heck of a thing to say as he lay there in an awful pool of dysentery. Spring is the laugh of a maniac, I say. Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this. I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality. I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes. I hope it will all turn out true. Madmen and suicidists see this. Also dying people and people in unbearable anguish. What SIN is there, but the sin of birth? Why doesnt Billy Graham admit it? How can a sacrificial Lamb of birth itself be considered a sinner? Who puts it there, who lit the fires, who's the longnosed rat who wants to waft Lamb smoke to Heaven so he can stash away a temple for himself? And to what use the materialists who are even worse because of their clunkhead ignorance of their own broken hearts? Like, silly behaviorists of the sociology and computer sciences today are more interested, mind you, in measuring the reactions to the pain of life, and in pinpointing the cause of pain on their own fellow humans, i.e., society, than in pinning it down once and for all on what it come from: birth. Even metaphysical gurus and philosopher prophets on the lecture circuit are absolutely certain that all the trouble can be attributed to such and such a government, a secretary of state, a defense minister (think of a "philosopher", mind you, like Bertrand Russell), trying to lay the blame on such born victims of birth as that, than on the very metaphysical causes they're supposed to propose to argue, that is, what comes before and after the physical, i.e., being born so that there can be dying. Who's going to come out and say that the mind of nature is intrinsically insane and vicious forever? - Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duloz, Penguin Books, London 1994, Book Thirteen, X-XI - The wheel of the quivering meat conception Turns in the void expelling human beings, Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits, Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics, Horrible unnameable lice of vultures, Murderous attacking dog-armies Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle, Vast boars and huge gigantic bull Elephants, rams, eagles, condors, Pones and Porcupines and PillsAll the endless conception of living beings Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness Throughout the ten directions of space Occupying all the quarters in and out, From supermicroscopic no-bug To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead - Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, Grove Press, New York 2007 (1959), p. 210 - Emancipate the human masses Of this world from slavery to life And death, by abolishing death And exterminating birth O Samson me that The Venerable Kerouac, friend of Cows DEPEND ON VAST MOTIONLESS THOUGHT - Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, Grove Press, New York 1990, p. 217 - The cause of the world's woe is birth, the cure of the world's woe is a bent stick. - Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, City Lights Books, San Francisco 1960, p. 33 - Kertesz Imre Quotes: No! I could never be another person's father, destiny, god. - Narrator - Imre Kertesz, Kaddish for a child not born, Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois 1997 (1990), p. 71 - Khayyam Omar Quotes: I wouldn't have come had I had my say, Nor would I leave Here if I had my way; Ah, nothing better in this world could be Than not to come, nor be, not go away. - Omar Khayyam, Rubaʼiyat of Omar Khayyam, Jain Publishing Company, 1991, p. 26 - Since it is the fate of man upon this earth to feed his soul on sorrow, he must be accounted happy who passes swiftly from the world, but he most happy who never comes into the world. - Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Quatrains of Omar Khayyam: In English Prose, Brnatano's, New York 1898, p. 72 - Since Heaven increases nothing but our pain, And gives naught that it takes not back again, The unborn ne'er would hither come if they But knew what we at Fortune's hands sustain. - Omar Khayyam, The Wisdom of Omar Khayyam, Citadel, New York 2001 - Then oh, what profit to the sphere my birth? Or, when I die, what will my death be worth? Or who beneath the vault of Heav'n can tell Or why we come, or why we leave the earth? - Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam, A. C. McClung & Company, Chicago 1906 - Kierkegaard Soren Quotes: A man is born in sin, he enters this world by means of a crime, his existence is a crime and procreation is the fall. - Soren Kierkegaard, The Last Years: The Kierkegaard Journals 1853-1855, Collins/Fontana, London 1968, p. 113 - That is what Christianity is for – which straightaway bars the way to procreation. This means: stop! - Soren Kierkegaard, The Last Years: The Kierkegaard Journals 1853-1855 - I give thanks to God that no living being owes me existence. - Soren Kierkegaard, The Last Years: The Kierkegaard Journals 1853-1855 - Knight Les U. Quotes: May we live long and die out. - Will Anderson, This Is Hope: Green Vegans and the New Human Ecology, John Hunt Publishing, 2013, p. 25 - Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth’s biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense. - Charles F. Gritzner, Environment and Natural Resources, Infobase Publishing, 2010, p. 113 - Kociuba Grzegorz Quoes: First, the damp, dark depths and a lonely embryo in a warm interior. He does not yet know that he has been betrayed, that the sentence has been dealt. In it, all his future illusions and defeats. For now he is still in the garden, beyond consciousness, but they will pull him out and his excruciating screaming will not help. Nobody will take pity on him here because no one has received pity. First, only as a body, unconscious of itself, but unfortunately, it can not remain that way. If only this body could see what awaits it! Perfidy lies in the fact that it can not! The body is not allowed to, because the sentence must be executed. The unspeakable horror of birth in which is already lying, curled up, the horror of life. This horror will then crawl out in all directions only to end up in a ditch, in a gutter, in a suburban railway car, on an icy sheet of a hospital bed or in warm sheets, among close ones, which are always too far away to tell them about themselves. If such is the beginning, what to expect at the end? Then, when they snatch him from inside, despite screams and pleas. When they wash the blood from their hands, like they would after they committed murder. Wandering begins, to meet someone, to get somewhere. Both are impossible, but this impossibility can only be seen after a while, so again it goes back to a few illusions and comforts, which make the boredom and monotony of the road more pleasant. All these gusts, elation, despair of awakened senses. And this is just a short leash of desires and unloadings. And this is just a thong of habits that will bind also many others after him. Dreams, illusions, fantasies, herds of them, they run, to finally fall from exhaustion anywhere, feeling muck on the face, debris, sticky mud puddles, and finally a massive stench of dirt exploding in the nostrils. - Grzegorz Kociuba, Ktos, Towarzystwo Literackie im. Staniskawa Pietaka, TarnobrzegRzeszow 2003 - Kolney Fernand Quotes: Everything is irremediably dreadful and Future cannot be unraveled on the weft of malfeasance the Past was weaved on. There is the truth. The only wisdom left is to welcome philosophical nihilism which prompts us to cancel everything, to destroy all things of the moral chaos we are struggling by extinction and voluntary inertia. - Fernand Kolney, L'amour dans 5000 ans, Roman, 1905 - No Sage ever dared to deny Man's abominable right to procreate. Still, as boded Clotilde, I don't have that right for two reasons. The first one being the fact I don't know who is the unborn child I'm carrying. Maybe it's a powerful, frightful monster? A soon to be inspired malefactor? Or maybe it's just another one of these billions morons on earth hastening and hustling like the spermatozoīds of Stupidity to fertilize the iniquity womb of civilized societies. - Fernand Kolney, La greve des ventres, Generation Consciente, 1907 - The second reason prevails over the first one. No matter the magnificence of the fate reserved to the being I gave birth to, may he surpass Pirrhon's wisdom or Antinous' beauty, may he surpass an oriental Dynaste's power or Crassus' fortune, life still wouldn't be worth living for. Because suffering is the norm and joy an accident. - Fernand Kolney, La greve des ventres, Generation Consciente, 1907 - Konopnicka Maria Quotes: Oh, the greatest of torments To put from embrace towards dawn The flower of death to bloom! Oh, the greatest of torments To sow the flower in the grave Flower from your own womb Oh, the greatest of torments To reproduce the moans To add one more moan One, the special one What tugs the mother spirit By the harshest of torments Oh, the greatest of punishmentst To feed the old hunger for life By giving them our blood To a huge pile of death Fuming with eternal heat Throw more wood! Oh, these hours will come, When the mother's pain rises, It will face the guilts of life Like earth replete with births And will ask in a reckoning voice: Where's your fruit? Where's your child? Oh, this hour will come, What starts to beat in the twilights, Into rust-coloured gunmental of centuries When these wombs close Like barren land Which give birth to their cross today - Maria Konopnicka, Botticelli, Poezye wydanie zupełne, krytyczne, Nakład Gebethnera i Wolfa, Warszawa-Lublin-Lodz-Krakow 1915 - Kraszewski Jozef Ignacy Quotes: One more martyr! Go back from where you came from, child There are enough unfortunate ones in the world without you, Go back, close your eyes, do not look at the world, Push away your mother's breasts and do not demand life. - Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski, Do Nowonarodzonego, S. Orgelbrand, Warszawa 1843 (1833) - You'll also find delight! – it's not worth being born for it, It's like a night star, it will be flashing and setting, And it will only rise so that the bloody suffering, Will tear your heart and soul even further. Such delight isn't worth the name of delight. And this world won't give you other one. - Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski, Do Nowonarodzonego, S. Orgelbrand, Warszawa 1843 (1833) - Krugovoy-Silver Anna Quotes: Forgive me your birth in this strange land. I wanted your infant kisses, your fists clasped round my neck. I craved you, though you were born in the wake of my illness, my dim prognosis. I was selfish: I willed you this woe, this world. You inherited exile for my sake. - Anya Krugovoy Silver, Psalm 137 for Noah, Second Bloom: Poems, Cascade Books, Eugene 2017, p. 43 - Kundera Milan Quotes: I'll be frank. I've always felt that it’s horrible to send a person into the world who didn't ask to be there. (...) Look around you. Of all the people you see, no one is here by his own wish. Of course, what I just said is the most banal truth there is. So banal, and so basic, that we've stopped seeing it and hearing it. (...) Everyone jabbers about human rights. What a joke! Your existence isn't founded on any right. They don’t even allow you to end your life by your own choice, these defenders of human rights. - Alain's imaginary mother - Milan Kundera, The Festival of Insignificance, HarperCollins, 2015 - Kurnig Books about antinatalism: Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sängewald, Leipzig 1903 (German language) Articles about antinatalism: Volkerbund, nicht: Volkerkrieg. Ein Blick in die pädagogische Anarchie der Gegenwart zugleich als Beitrag zur nihilistischen Weltanschauung (im Sinne Schopenhauers), 1894 (German language, under the pseudonym of Quartus) Quotes: I consider human life as something which is overall unpleasant, as a misfortune. Unborn people would not ask for it. In the face of abysmal misery I was unable to simply watch taking on the passive role of an observer. - Kurnig, Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sängewald, Leipzig 1903, translated by Karim Akerma - I beget you – we hear a parent saying – in order to see with pleasure what is inside you and what is not. By the same token, however, I am forcing upon you a lot of suffering and, finally, the ghastly catastrophe of dying. - Kurnig, Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sängewald, Leipzig 1903, translated by Karim Akerma - Not by violent means (murder, war and the like), but peacefully, let mankind disappear from our globe. - Kurnig, Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sängewald, Leipzig 1903, p. 51, translated by Karim Akerma - It is better to accept martyrdom in whatever form – which is connected to non-procreation – than to procreate. - Kurnig, Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sängewald, Leipzig 1903, p. 57, translated by Karim Akerma - You think you're saying and doing something pretty strong, beautiful, full of character, don't you? But do you know what it is? Weakness of character and ignorance. I mourn the creatures you bring into the world who could not defend themselves when you created them, who otherwise would have protested out loud against your action. Since it all boils down to suffering and destruction. Our race serves nothing and exists only as a result of those who, like you, do not examine things thoroughly. Life is suffering; to abstain from procreation is philanthropy and duty. - Kurnig, Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sangewald, Leipzig 1903, p. 84, translated by Karim Akerma - Never to have procreated – this be your consolation when you die. - Kurnig, Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sangewald, Leipzig 1903, p. 92, translated by Karim Akerma - The silence of some of us may not confuse us. Because of external circumstances many are not allowed to admit that they are pessimists and, therefore, not prepared to have children. - Kurnig, Der Neo-Nihilismus. Anti-Militarismus. Sexualleben (Ende der Menschheit), Verlag Max Sangewald, Leipzig 1903, p. 126, translated by Karim Akerma - Lamartine de Alphonse Quotes: What crime we have committed to deserve to be born? - Alphonse de Lamartine, Meditazioni poetiche, 1820 - Larkin Philip Quotes: They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can. And don't have any kids yourself. - Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse, New Humanist, August 1971 - Larock Marc Articles about antinatalism: Possible preferences and the harm of existence, University of St Andrews, St Andrews 2009 Quotes: All of us are brought into existence, without our consent, and over the course of our lives we are acquainted with a multitude of goods. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the amount of good each of us will have in our lives. Eventually each of us will die and we will be permanently cut off from the prospect of any further good. Existence, viewed in this way, seems to be a cruel joke. - Marc Larock, Possible preferences and the harm of existence, University of St Andrews, 2009, p. 89 - Perhaps the day will never come when people realize that moral patients like us should cease to exist. It would be an unconscionable tragedy if we never do. I remain optimistic, however. Some very interesting arguments have recently been advanced in support of the conclusion that it is always worse for a person to live than not. I suspect that many more will follow. Until the day that individuals begin to take non-procreation seriously on a widespread scale, perhaps all we can do is follow Schopenhauer: "The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instil in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes." (On the Sufferings of the World) - Marc Larock, Possible preferences and the harm of existence, University of St Andrews, 2009, p. 138 - Lawrence Thomas Edward Quotes: Birth seems to me so sorry and squalid an accident (...) if fathers and mothers took thought before bringing children into this misery of a world, only the monsters among them would dare to go through with it. - John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1998, p. 423 - Le Linda Books about antinatalism: A l'enfant que je n'aurai pas, Editions NiL, Paris 2011 (French language) Lenharo di Santis Thiago Books about antinatalism: Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, LGE Editora, Brasilia 2009, co-author with Julio Cabrera (Portuguese language). Quotes: Certainly there is a risk involved in procreation. But the real problem is not that there is risk, but that it extends to the child, not just being limited to the father and mother. The decision affirmatively taken exceeds, in execution and implications, the parts that made the decision, involving a necessarily non-aware and non-potent being. The implication of the action will also be up to, and mainly, the new being, who had nothing to do with the decision, since they did not participate in this process, being loaded with impositions afterwards (including, potentially, that of suicide). - Julio Cabrera, Thiago Lenharo di Santis, Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, LGE Editora, Brasilia 2009 , p. 99 - To warn children that the world is full of selfish people who want to take advantage of them, who will practice injustices against them, is to warn them that there are other people in the world like the generators themselves. It's to inform them that even with a world full of people like that, exploitative and unjust, and even life being very difficult, the generators (who knew this) obliged the children to be, even though they could avoid it. - Julio Cabrera, Thiago Lenharo di Santis, Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, LGE Editora, Brasilia 2009 , p. 146 - Seeing that there is nothing that guarantees that the child will be "happy", that any effort that is made for this may be in vain, that if the child did not exist, this problem wouldn't exist, and that such problem arised because the child was obliged to be born for the luxury of his parents, and that it could have been avoided, from all this follows that a responsible and sensitive "procreator" (or rather a responsible pre-procreator) would stop right there, precisely at "pre". - Julio Cabrera, Thiago Lenharo di Santis, Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, LGE Editora, Brasilia 2009, pp. 162-163 - For the bet, in this case, has put at risk another innocent being, without power, knowledge and responsibility; the bet was unnecessary and could have been avoided; if it had been avoided, it would not harm this innocent, and it was not avoided because it was a compulsive gambler. - Julio Cabrera, Thiago Lenharo di Santis, Porque te amo, Nao nasceras! Nascituri te salutant, LGE Editora, Brasilia 2009, pp. 186-187 - Leopardi Giacomo Quotes: But wherefore give him life? Why bring him up at all, if this be all? If life is nought but pain and care, why, why should we the burden bear? - Giacomo Leopardi, Night Song Of A Wandering Shepherd In Asia, 1830 - Perhaps in every state beneath the sun, Or high, or low, in cradle or in stall, The day of birth is fatal to us all. - Giacomo Leopardi, Night Song Of A Wandering Shepherd In Asia, 1830 - Being asked for what purpose he thought men were born, he laughingly replied: To realise how much better it were not to be born. - Giacomo Leopardi, Operette Morali, Remarkable sayings of Philip Ottonieri, 1827 - Are we born, then, only to feel what happiness it would be had we not been born? - Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2015 (1898-1900), p. 1329 - Everything is evil. That is to say everything that is, is evil; that each thing exists is an evil; each thing exists only for an evil end; existence is an evil and made for evil; the end of the universe is evil; the order and the state, the laws, the natural development of the universe are nothing but evil, and they are directed to nothing but evil. There is no other good except nonbeing; there is nothing good except what is not; things that are not things: all things are bad. All existence; the complex of so many worlds that exist; the universe; is only a spot, a speck in metaphysics. Existence, by its nature and essence and generally, is an imperfection, an irregularity, a monstrosity. But this imperfection is a tiny thing, literally a spot, because all the worlds that exist, however many and however extensive they are, since they are certainly not infinite in number or in size, are consequently infinitely small in comparison with the size the universe might be if it were infinite, and the whole of existence is infinitely small in comparison with the true infinity, so to speak, of nonexistence, of nothing. - Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2015 (1898-1900), p. 1822 - Levy Joseph Articles about antinatalism: The problem with existence, Western Washington University, Ephemeris 2016 Quotes: The risk principle claims that is pro tanto wrong for one person to put another individual at risk of harm without their consent. - Joseph Levy, The problem with existence, Western Washington University, Ephemeris 2016, p 46 - Licon Jimmy Alfonso Articles about antinatalism: The Immorality Of Procreation, Think 2012, volume 11, issue 32, pp. 85-91 Quotes: This is the consent argument: 1. An individual is justified in subjecting someone to potential harm only if either: (a) they provide informed consent, (b) such is in their best interests, or (c) they deserve to be subjected to potential harm. 2. Bringing someone into existence is potentially subjecting them to harm. 3. Individuals that do not exist: (a) cannot give their consent to being brought into existence, (b) do not have interests to protect, and (c) do not deserve anything. 4. Hence, procreation is not morally justified. - Jimmy Alfonso Licon, The Immorality Of Procreation, Think 2012, volume 11, issue 32, p. 88 - Ligotti Thomas Books about antinatalism: The Conspiracy Against The Human Race: A Contrivance Of Horror, Hippocampus Press, New York 2010 Quotes: As their numbers tapered off, these dead-enders of our species could be the most privileged individuals in history and share with one another material comforts once held in trust only for the well-born or moneygetting classes of the world. Since personal economic gain would be passe as a motive for the new humanity, there would be only one defensible incitement to work: to see one another through to the finish, a project that would keep everyone busy and not just staring into space while they waited for the end. There might even be bright smiles exchanged among these selfless benefactors of those who would never be forced to exist. - Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, Hippocampus Press, New York 2010, pp. 58-59 - Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species' obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparking Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world – for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by ''human suffering,'' the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But those are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe's "Last Messiah". It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgap world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real. - Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, Hippocampus Press, New York 2010, p. 63 - As for procreation, no one in his right mind would say that it is the only activity devoid of a praiseworthy incentive. Those who reproduce, then, should not feel unfairly culled as the worst conspirators against the human race. Every one of us is culpable in keeping the conspiracy alive, which is all right with most people. - Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, Hippocampus Press, New York 2010, p. 174 - Personally, I'm afraid of suffering and afraid of dying. I'm also afraid of witnessing the suffering and death of those who are close to me. And no doubt I project these fears on those around me and those to come, which makes it impossible for me to understand why everyone isn't an antinatalist, just as I have to assume pronatalists can't understand why everyone isn't like them. - The Hat Rack, Interview: Thomas Ligotti, 06.09.2011 - Despite the fact that neither anti- nor pronatalists can prove their positions, pro-natalists have to live with the possibility that they might be wrong. That is a heavy burden to carry, and a heavier burden to pass on to subsequent generations. Antinatalists don't have a similar burden. When action is taken on their side and a child is not born, no harm is done. No one has to suffer and die. - The Hat Rack, Interview: Thomas Ligotti, 06.09.2011 - In an essay on David Benatar's antinatalist book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, the Finnish philosopher, Sami Pihlstrom (Metaphilosophy, volume 40, number 5, October 2009 , pp. 656-670), argued that whether or not life is worth living is a question that is intolerable and should never be discussed. I hope things dont's come to that. - The Hat Rack, Interview: Thomas Ligotti, 06.09.2011 - It was only after publishing The Conspiracy against the Human Race that I became aware of an interesting fact: the first horror story that I preserved and is in print was "The Last Feast of Harlequin." I wrote it during my recovery phase of a years long depression in the seventies. The narrator is a depressive sociologist who discovers an antinatalist cult living in a small Midwestern town. Every so-many years they hold a ceremony in which they consume ''literally'' a female who serves symbolically as a fertility symbol. They despise life and sing to the "unborn in paradise." In my latest book, "The Conspiracy against the Human Race", I also express an antinatalist philosophy, so my writing has come full circle. - The Damned Interviews, Interview: Thomas Ligotti, 21.01.2011 - Dear Mom and Dad, I always wanted to ask: when you went through the motions that brought me to this dubious world, did you ever pause to think that I might rather you didn’t? Were you so possessed you could not pause to consider the full repercussions of making it? Of course, it behooves me to extend the benefit of the doubt, to attribute to you some vague notion that you acted in my interest, saving me from my peregrinations in nonexistence, a stranger to being, bumbling in darkness for the light of life on this earth. Such is a common rationalization, and so I must allow its hold upon you. Yet I must also posit that all you wanted was to be in with the crowd, the ancient mob that cheered you on with mad eyes, flared nostrils, and spittle-dripping chins – those ones whose approval you secretly sought. All of these are plausible explanations for what you did in a chamber cut off from cool reflection in favor of the primal rite. Whatever your reasons, the fact remains of my emergence from that dilated aperture. Whatever your excuses, I must confess I’ve always lamented the day you met. All that aside, I just wanted to take some time, having reached the moment in which I’ll make an end to what you began, to say that I forgive you. - Thomas Ligotti, Writing home, Death Poems, Durtro, 2004 - Locke William John Quotes: By bringing children into the world by means of a marriage of convenience I should be imposing the burden of existence upon them in cold blood. I agree with Schopenhauer. - John William Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne, Ripol Classic, Moscow 1906, p. 25 - Lovecraft Howard Phillips Quotes: It is good to be a cynic it is better to be a contented cat and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek deaththe same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed. - Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Nietzscheism and Realism, Miscellaneous Writings, Arkham House Publishers, Sauk City, Wisconsin 1995 (1921), p. 175 - Lucian, Lucianists Quotes about Lucian and Lucianists: He teaches that people should refrain from marriage to oppose the prospering of the demiurge and creator through human procreation "because matrimony," he says, "is a source of prosperity for the demiurge, through human procreation." - Epiphanius, The Panarion of Ephiphanius of Salamis: Book I (sects 1-46), Brill, 1987, p. 338, it is about Lucian, disciple of Marcion of Sinope, not about Lucian of Antioch - Lucretius Quotes: What loss were ours, if we had know not birth? Let living men to longer life aspire, While fond affection binds their hearts to earth But who never hath tasted life's desire, Unborn, impersonal, can feel no dearth - Henry S. Salt, Treasures Of Lucretius: Selected Passages from the "De Rerum Natura", Watts and Co., London, 1912, p. 53 - Luther Martin Quotes: And yet, it is not to be denied, that both the father and mother have Corrupt flesh, and that the seed itself is full, not only of filthy lust, but of contempt and hatred of God: and thus, it is not be denied, that there is sin in procreation. - Martin Luther, Select Works of Martin Luther: An Offering to the Church of God in "the Last Days", T. Bensley, London 1826, p. 115 - Machado de Assis Joaquim Maria Quotes: I had no children. I haven't transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature. - Bras Cubas - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Oxford University Press, New York 1997 (1881), p. 203 - Mainlander Philipp Quotes: The ideal state would be the ultimate utopia, a socialistic paradise to which all efforts of humanity will finally lead. It will be a world without war, hunger and any sufferings beside the sufferings of birth, age and death. All sicknesses will be cured, and people will have lifes of joy with just a very small amount of work, because work will almost completely be deported to machines. So let's take a closer look on the citizens of that ideal state. Are they happy? They would be, if they wouldn't suffer from horrible boredom and an everlasting emptiness in their lifes now. If they even manage to live such a pointless life until natural death, they will not be willing to force new people into this mess by procreating. They have no hope left, because they know that they already reached the ideal state. Therefore, they will come to the conclusion that human life has to end or maybe even that all life has to end, because they finally realized that there is nothing to accomplish for sentience and that it would be better if they never had existed. This will be the point where the movement of humanity (or even the movement of all life on earth) will be fulfilled and the universe would now have to move on without (human) life on earth, to reach its own final goal, which is exactly the same: Turning into nothingness. - Philipp Mainlander, Philosophie der Erlosung. Ausgewahlt und mit einem Vorwort versehen von Ulrich Horstmann, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989 - Redemption of the individual idea one represents, can be reached by not passing the core of this idea to the future. In other words: by not procreating. Who doesn't live on in his progeny, will be absolutely redeemed from existence. - Philipp Mainlander, Philosophie der Erlosung. Ausgewahlt und mit einem Vorwort versehen von Ulrich Horstmann, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989 - Mani, Manichaeans Quotes about Mani and Manichaeans: If anyone condemns human marriage and has a horror of the procreation of living bodies, as Manichaeus and Priscillian have said, let him be anathema. - Council of Braga II, 561, 241 11., J. T. Noonan Jr., Contraception; a history of its treatment by the Catholic theologians and canonists, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1986, p. 61 - The rejection of procreation, the condemnation of hunting, indeed in effect of all knightly sport because of the fear of harming light particles, must necessarily have led to disputes when it came to acquainting the ruling warrior class with his teachings. - Iain Gardner & Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2004, p. 7 - The Manichean attitude to marriage was entirely negative as the act of procreation prolongs the imprisonment of Soul, which would now be further diversified into matter. - Iain Gardner & Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2004, p. 22 - The creation of Eve had a special purpose. She is more thoroughly subject to the demons, thus becoming their instrument against Adam; "to her they imparted of their concupiscence in order to seduce Adam" – a seduction not only to carnal but through it to reproduction, the most formidable device in Satan's strategy. For not only would it indefinitely prolong the captivity of Light, but it would also through the multiplication so disperse the Light as to render infinitely more difficult the work of salvation, whose only way is to awaken every individual soul. For the Darkness, therefore, everything turned on the seduction of Adam, as for the celestials, on awakening him in time to prevent his seduction. - Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christiantty, Beacon Press, Boston 1958, p. 228 - The practical conclusions from this cosmo-soteriologicalsystem are extremely clear-cut, all of them amounting to a rigorous asceticism. "Since the ruin of the Hyle is decreed by God, one should abstain from all ensouled things and eat only vegetables and whatever else is non-sentient, and abstain from marriage, the delights of love and the begetting of children, so that the divine Power may not through the succession of generations remain longer in the Hyle." However, one must not, in order to help effect the purification of things, commit suicide. - Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christiantty, Beacon Press, Boston 1958, p. 231 - The soul of the person who persisted in things of the flesh fornication, procreation, possessions, cultivation, harvesting, eating of meat, drinking of wine – is condemned to rebirth in a succession of bodies. - Wendy Doniger, Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions, Merriam-Webster, Springfield, Massachusetts 1999, pp. 689-690 - Marcion of Sinope, Marcionites Quotes about Marcion of Sinope and Marcionites: He rejects marriage and procreation so that the created world will not be perpetuated. - George E. Karamanolis, The Philosophy of Early Christianity, Routledge, 2014, p. 241 - Here the pollution by the flesh and its lust, so widespread a theme in this age, is not even mentioned; instead (though not to its exclusion: cf. Tertullian, op. cit. I. 19, where marriage is called a "filthiness" or "obscenity" [spurcitiae]) it is the aspect of reproduction which disqualifies sexuality that very aspect which in the eyes of the Church alone justifies it as its purpose under nature's dispensation. Marcion here voices a genuine and typical gnostic argument, whose fullest elaboration we shall meet in Mani: that the reproductive scheme is an ingenious archontic device for the indefinite retention of souls in the world. - Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christiantty, Beacon Press, Boston 1958, pp. 144-145 - In Marcion's view, all procreation only prolonged suffering as the new souls thus created were captured in a material prison. - Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski, Clement of Alexandria: A Project of Christian Perfection, A&C Black, 2008, p. 137 - Demiurge made a bad job of creation. It goes without saying that mankind as part of creation, is not a whit better than creation itself (of than the Demiurge). It must not surprise us that of all the Demiurge's institutions Marcion most of all loathed sexuality and procreation, for this is where man becomes creative himself. "Marcion's god expresses disapproval of marriage, as an evil thing, and as a traffic in unchastity." Marcion ridiculed pregnancy, child-bearing, and the rearing of the baby. If all this is evil, it is the Demiurge who is responsible for it. - Petrus Franciscus Maria Fontaine, Gnostic Dualism in Asia Minor During the First Centuries, A.D. II, Brill Academic Pub, 1994, p. 72 - None were admitted to baptism, or the Eucharist, unless they had taken an oath against having any children. - Nathaniel Lardner, John Hogg The Historie of the Heretics of the Two First Centuries, J. Johnson, 1780, p. 240 - And then, he did not believe in marriage, believing that procreation was an invention of the evil Old Testament God – or so Tertullian reported. Marcion was a flawed character: his biblical exegesis reveals a superlative mind, his doctrine of Pauline charity an admirable character, but his views on sex set him down as an eccentric. - Paul Johnson, History of Christianity, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976, p. 47 - de Maupassant Guy Quotes: God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He seems to have made them only in order that they may reproduce their species in an ignoble manner and then die like ephemeral insects. I said reproduce their species in an ignoble manner and I adhere to that expression. What is there as a matter of fact more ignoble and more repugnant than that act of reproduction of living beings, against which all delicate minds always have revolted and always will revolt? - Guy de Maupassant, Useless Beauty, Wildside Press, Rockville, Maryland 2007 (1890), p. 126 - Melo Rafael Tages Books about antinatalism: A utima filosofia: An essay about antinatalism, CreateSpace, 2012 (Portuguese language) Metzinger Thomas Articles about antinatalism: Benevolent Artificial Anti-Natalism (BAAN), Edge, 08.07.2017 Quotes: But what if, as the first truly compassionate philosophical ethicist, it would then attempt to convince us that it was high time to peacefully terminate the ugly biological bootstrap-phase on this planet? - Thomas Metzinger, Benevolent Artificial Anti-Natalism (BAAN), Edge, 08.07.2017 - Ming-Dao Deng Quotes: The two Taoists reminded Saihung that the critical thing in life was to die a spiritual death, to merge with the Void. In order to do so, one had to be free of the cycle of reincarnation. This meant absolutely no earthly ties. The important point was that having children automatically tied one to the circle of reincarnation. How could it be otherwise? By passing on one's metaphysical and physical genetics, one perpetuated one's earthly karma. This was why the sages had no biological children. - Deng Ming-Dao, Seven Bamboo Tablets of the Cloudy Satchel, p. 261 - Milosz Czeslaw Quotes: I tell myself: Reluctance to think to the end Is lifesaving for the living. Could lucid consciousness Bear everything that in every minute, Simultaneously, occurs on the earth? Not to harm. Stop eating fish and meat. Let oneself be castrated, like Tiny, a cat innocent Of the drownings of kittens every day in our city. The Cathari were right: Avoid the sin of conception (For either you kill your seed and will be tormented by conscience Or you will be responsible for a life of pain). - Czeslaw Milosz, Pajak (Spider), Dalsze okolice, Znak, Krakow, 1991 - On a gynecological chair open knees. Defenseless viscera shattered by childbirth. And the first scream, terror of exile into the world, On a frozen river, in a stony city. - Czeslaw Milosz, Body, Selected Poems, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow 1996 - Milton John Quotes: If care of our descent perplex us most, Which must be born to certain woe, devoured By Death at last; and miserable it is To be to others cause of misery, Our own begotten, and of our loins to bring Into this cursed world a woeful race, That after wretched life must be at last Food for so foul a monster; in thy power It lies, yet ere conception to prevent The race unblest, to being yet unbegot. Childless thou art, childless remain: so Death Shall be deceived his glut, and with us two Be forced to satisfy his ravenous maw. - Eve - John Milton, Paradise lost, Cambridge University Press, New York 2013 (1667), p. 73 - Mishra Ramesh (under the pseudonym of Ken Coates) Books about antinatalism: Anti-Natalism: Rejectionist Philosophy from Buddhism to Benatar, First Edition Design Publisher, 2014 Quotes: Is it really necessary to endorse existence via procreation and thus prolong it? This too demands a reasoned answer. Programmed by nature and socialized by the collective, which demands conformity, we are required to play the "game" of life. But as one of Beckett's characters put sit, ''why this farce day after day?'' Where is all this leading to? - Ken Coates, Anti-Natalism: Rejectionist Philosophy from Buddhism to Benatar, First Edition Design Publisher, 2014 - Procreation imposes existence on beings who have not chosen to be born. It amounts to a form of enslavement or conscription which is an immoral act on two counts: violating the autonomy of a potential being, and exposing them to pain and suffering. - Ken Coates, Anti-Natalism: Rejectionist Philosophy from Buddhism to Benatar, First Edition Design Publisher, 2014 - Muller Philipp Books about antinatalism: Freitod – Die beste Losung: eine Abrechnung mit der Lebensbejahung, Books on Demand, 2004 (German language) Nagrobki And when the pale dawn comes, And when the pale dawn comes, I will bury you, You will bury me, Thank you, mother, for this gift of life, Thank you, mother, for this gift of life, Next time you may ask for permission, Next time you may ask for permission, Thank you, dad, for making me, Thank you, dad, for making me, Next time, think for a moment, Next time, think for a moment. - Nagrobki (Tombstones), Blady świt (Pale dawn), Stan prac, BDTA, 2016 - Neuffer Martin Books about antinatalism: Nein zum Leben – Ein Essay, Safchbuch Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992 (German language) Quotes: We may ask ourselves whether people have a moral right to create people and thus condemn them to a life and death without their consent. - Martin Neuffer, Nein zum Leben – Ein Essay, Safchbuch Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 79 - Onfray Michel Quotes: Not having children comes not from dislike or depise, but from love too great to bring them into this world, too limited, too vain, to cruel. - Michel Onfray, Journal hedoniste: Tome 2, Les Vertus de la foudre, Grasset, Paris 1998 - Life is, in sum, a race that leads us from the void from whence we emerge to that which engulfs us. Eternity exists for itself. Life breezes past (...) Should we entertain this prank? Should we enrich this cruel play as if none of the above matters? Should we wish to be blinded, to be forever free of blame, not to think but to obey a capricious and imperious libido to give oneself the illusion that one has fought effectively against the perpetually triumphant death? - Michel Onfray, Journal hedoniste: Tome 2, Les Vertus de la foudre, Grasset, Paris 1998 - I can at least not contribute, through reproductivity complicit with the vast entropy of the universe, to perpetuating the eternal cruelty of the world and of the destiny of a being I would have snatched from the fog of non-existence to a state they didn't have to be in, to be happy in that moment, as they would be above and beyond that. - Michel Onfray, Theorie du corps amoureux, Grasset, Paris 2000 - Why, in the name of what and to what end does one have children? With what legitimacy do we materialise a being out of non-existence to merely propose to them a brief passage on this planet before they return to the very same non-existence? - Michel Onfray, Theorie du corps amoureux, Grasset, Paris 2000 - In a hedonistic logic, we ought to avoid imposing anything, existence included, to anyone who hasn't asked for it. - Michel Onfray, Theorie du corps amoureux, Grasset, Paris 2000 - Childless by choice love children as much, if not more than their fertile breeders. When asked why he does not have children, Tales replied, "just because of the concern for children." - Michel Onfray, Theorie du corps amoureux, Grasset, Paris 2000 - Pereleshin Valerii Quotes: The Poem was ''Manichean. It denies life, marriage, and procreation'' (Probably about a poem named ''Poem without a Subject'' [''Poema bez predmeta'']). - Olga Bakich, Valerii Pereleshin: The Life of a Silkworm, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2015, p. 195 - Condemning procreation was the theme of my entire life (...) I have always been tormented by the unneccessary nature, the meaningless, the aimlessness of being. - Olga Bakich, Valerii Pereleshin: The Life of a Silkworm, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2015, p. 243 - The tragedy of my life became the basis for my Manichean world view and for my hatred towards human striving to deveive death by procreation, even though it suits death well: 'mortal children' ensure its triumph (and ensure a steady supply of meat for maggots). - Olga Bakich, Valerii Pereleshin: The Life of a Silkworm, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2015, p. 258 - The perpetuation of suffering by producing children is the greatest crime. - Olga Bakich, Valerii Pereleshin: The Life of a Silkworm, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2015, p. 258 - Perry Sarah Books about antinatalism: Every Cradle Is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide, Nine-Banded Books, Charleston, West Virginia 2014 Quotes: Te principle of caution, respecting the gravity of human suffering, weighs against procreating to the extent that it is unpredictable whether the person created will have a good life. - Sarah Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide, NineBanded Books, Charleston, West Virginia 2014 - Pessoa Fernando Quotes: Whatever the case, it would have been better not to be born. - Fernando Pessoa, Passagem Das Horas, 1916 - Phibionites (also known as Borborites) Quotes about Phibionites: The Phibionites it is claimed practised rites of sexual union while refusing procreation. - Geo Widengren, E. J. Brill, 1969, Historia Religionum: Religions of the past, p. 570 - "Procreation is wrong because it only divides this psyche and prolongs the time the psyche must spend in this world." - Harvard Theological Studies, Tom 24, Scholars Press, 1970, p. 28 - The most notorious of the groups that Epiphanius attacks were known by a variety of names, including the "Phibionites". According to Epiphanius our sole source of information about the group these Gnostic believers engaged in nocturnal sex rituals that involved indiscriminate sex, coitus interruptus, and the consumption of semen and menstrual blood, all in a bizarre act of Christian worship (a sacred eucharist). Moreover, they allegedly possessed apostolic books that supported their outrageous rituals, including one known as the :Greater Questions of Mary: (Panarion 26.8). Epiphanius claims to have had access to this and the other Phibionite books. But this one he actually quotes. If the quotation does indeed go back to an actual document, as opposed to Epiphanius's fertile imagination, it is no wonder that the book never survived, as it recounts an episode in which Jesus himself engages in a sex act before a very bewildered Mary Magdalene. For the Gnostic Phibionites, this text, and their corresponding rituals, related to their doctrinal views that humans represent divine sparks entrapped in human bodies, which need to escape. Human procreation perpetuates this state of entrapment, by providing an endless supply of bodies. - Bart Ehrman, Zlatko Plese, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, Oxford University Press, New York 2011, pp. 607-608 - Pizzolatto Nic Quotes: I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; a secretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. - Rustin Cohle - Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, The Long Bright Dark, HBO 2014 - The hubris it must take to yank a soul out of non existence, into this, meat. And to force a life into this, thresher. - Rustin Cohle - Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, Seeing Things, HBO 2014 - Prior Matthew Quotes: But O! beyond description, happiest he Who ne'er must roll on life's tumultuous sea; Who with bless'd freedom, from the general doom Exempt, must never face the teeming womb, Nor see the sun, nor sink into the tomb! Who breathes must suffer; and who thinks must mourn; And he alone is blessed who ne'er was born. - Matthew Prior, Solomon, The Poems of Matthew Prior, volume 1, Chiswick Press, London 1822 (1718), p. 271 - Priscillian of Avila, Priscillianists Quotes about Priscillian of Avila and Priscillianists: If anyone condemns human marriage and has a horror of the procreation of living bodies, as Manichaeus and Priscillian have said, let him be anathema. - Council of Braga II, 561, 241 11., J. T. Noonan Jr., Contraception; a history of its treatment by the Catholic theologians and canonists, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1986, p. 61 - Priscillianists taught a modalist doctrine of the Trinity and denied the pre-existence of Christ as well as his real humanity; they condemned marriage, the procreation of children, and eating meat. - John Bowker, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, Oxford University Press, New York 2000 - The human body, as all other flesh, according to the Priscillianistic doctrine, came from the devil. (...) The same principles led them to disapprove of marriage, and of the procreation of children; and to forbid the eating of flesh. - Johann Lorenz Mosheim, Institutes Of Ecclesiastical History, Ancient And Modern... , Nabu Press, Charleston, South Carolina 2011, p. 171 - Puissance Quotes: The hunger that causes our pain of life, is not a hunger of our own, it is the hunger of our masters, the tiny strings inside our genome, they own us, they control us, and they torture us. Do not reproduce, do not support them, bring them to an end. Stop the agony of concious life, eradicate life. - Puissance, Bringer of closure, State Collapse, Equilibrium Music, 2004 - Puls Heiko Articles about antinatalism: - Kant's Justification of Parental Duties, Kantian Review 21 (1), Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 53-75 - Quartus -> Kurnig Rigoni Mario Andrea Quotes: Propagate life is to propagate terror. - Mario Andrea Rigoni, Variazioni sull'impossibile, Rizzoli, Milano 1993 - Robinson Marilynne Quotes: Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly – My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against our returning. - Ruth - Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1980 - Rulli Tina Articles about antinatalism: The Ethics of Procreation and Adoption, The Ethics of Procreation and Adoption, Philosophy Compass 11/6, 2016, pp. 305-315 Quotes: Adoption offers an important moral alternative to procreation, which has been widely ignored or quickly dismissed in the procreation literature. It should be considered by reasonable and moral people who desire to experience the goods of a parent-child relationship while being concerned about the potential harms of procreation. - Tina Rulli, The Ethics of Procreation and Adoption, The Ethics of Procreation and Adoption, Philosophy Compass 11/6, 2016, p. 313 - Saturnilus of Antioch Quotes about Saturnilus of Antioch: He also declared that the Savior was unborn, incorporeal and without form, asserting that he was seen as a human being in appearance only [putative autem visum hominem]. The God of the Jews, he declares, was one of the angels; and because the Father wished to destroy all the rulers [principes], Christ came to destroy the God of the Jews, and to save all who believed in him, and these are they who have a spark of his life. He was the first to say that two kinds of men were fashioned by the Angels, one bad, the other good. And because the demons aid the worst, the Saviour came to destroy the bad men and the Demons and to save the good. But to marry and procreate they say is of Satan. The majority of his disciples abstain from meat, and by this false temperance have led many people astray. As far as prophecies go, they say that some of these were made by the angels who created the world, and others by Satan. This last, according to Saturninus, is himself an angel, but an angel who is opposed to the creators of the world and, above all, to the God of the Jews. - Alister E. McGrath, John Wiley & Sons, 2016, p. 226 - Schopenhauer Arthur Quotes: If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood? - Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies In Pessimism, On the Sufferings of the World, Cosimo, New York 2007, p. 8 - Some of the church fathers have taught that even marital cohabitation should only be allowed when it occurs merely for the sake of the procreation of children (...). Clemens (Strom, iii. c. 3) attributes this view to the Pythagoreans. This is, however, strictly speaking, incorrect. For if the coitus be no longer desired for its own sake, the negation of the Will-toLive has already appeared, and the propagation of the human race is then superfluous and senseless, inasmuch as its purpose is already attained. Besides, without any subjective passion, without lust and physical pressure, with sheer deliberation, and the cold blooded purpose to place a human being in the world merely in order that he should be there this would be such a very questionable moral action that few would take it upon themselves; one might even say of it indeed that it stood in the same relation to generation from the mere sexual impulse as a cold-blooded deliberate murder does to a death-stroke given in anger. - Arthur Schopenhauer, Selected Essays of Schopenhauer, G. Bell and Sons, London 1926, Contributions to the Doctrine of the Affirmation and Nega-tion of the Will-to-live, p. 269 - The woman's share in procreation is more guiltless than the man's; for he bestows upon the child its will, which is the first sin, and therefore the root of all evil; the woman, on the contrary, bestows its intellect, which is the pathway to redemption. - Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and paralipomena, part 167 - How shall a man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity! - Arthur Schopenhauer, On Human Nature: Essays in Ethics and Politics, Dover Publications, New York 2010, p. 2 - At bottom, however, it is quite superfluous to dispute whether there is more good or evil in the world: for the mere existence of evil decides the matter. For the evil can never be annulled, and consequently can never be balanced by the good which may exist along with it or after it. For that a thousand had lived in happiness and pleasure would never do away with the anguish and death-agony of a single one; and just as little does my present wellbeing undo my past suffering. If, therefore, the evils in the world were a hundred times less than is the case, yet their mere existence would be sufficient to establish a truth which may be expressed in different ways, though always somewhat indirectly, the truth that we have not to rejoice but rather to mourn at the existence of the world; that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; that it is something which at bottom ought not to be. - Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea, vol. III., Chapter XLVI. On The Vanity And Suffering Of Life, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1964 (1844), p. 386 - The End of the World, here's salvation. Preparing the end, here's the work of the sage and the supreme purpose of ascetic existences. The apostle of charity, with effort, alms, consolations and miracles, succeeds with great difficulty to save a family from death, now vowed to a long agony thanks to his benefits. The ascetist on the other hand, saves entire generations not from death, but from life. - Paul Challemel-Lacour, Un Bouddhiste contemporain en Allemagne – Arthur Schopenhauer, Revue des Deux Mondes T. 86, 1870 - Schreiner Olive Quotes: I have no conscience, none, but I would not like to bring a soul into this world. When it sinned and when it suffered something like a dead hand would fall on me – "You did it, you, for your own pleasure you created this thing! See your work!" - Lyndall - Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, The Floating Press, Auckland 2009 (1883), p. 314 - Schulman Sarah Quotes: Unfortunately, in our real world, large numbers of children grow up to be victims, perpetrators, or bystanders. Very few children actually grow up to make the world a better place. Personally, I don't feel that creating new victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is the great social ooh-and-aah that it is made out to be. I do understand that people want to have children for reasons personal to their own needs, not necessarily for the child or for the world, and perhaps that's reason enough, but I don't know why. - Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, Univ of California Press, 2013, p. 158 - Seneca Lucius Annaeus Quotes: Nothing is so deceptive, nothing is so treacherous as human life; by Hercules, were it not given to men before they could form an opinion, no one would take it. Not to be born, therefore, is the happiest lot of all, and the nearest thing to this, I imagine, is that we should soon finish our strife here and be restored again to our former rest. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Dialogues and Essays, Consolation to Marcia, 40-45 AD - Shackelford Todd K. -> Chowdhury Sayma H. Shiffrin Seana Quotes: Four factors make the appeal to hypothetical consent problematic: (1) the fact that great harm is not at stake if no action is taken; (2) but if action is taken, the harms suffered may be very severe; (3) the imposed condition cannot be escaped without high costs; and (4) the hypothetical consent procedure is not based on features of the individual who will bear the imposed condition. - Seana Shiffrin, Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 133 - Singh Asheel Articles about antinatalism: Furthering the Case for Anti-natalism: Seana Shiffrin and the Limits of Permissible Harm, South African Journal of Philosophy 2012, volume 31, issue 1, pp. 104-116 Assessing anti-natalism: a philosophical examination of the morality of procreation, University of Johannesburg, 2012 Quotes: One need not believe that coming into existence is always an overall harm in order to favour an anti-natal perspective; one need only believe that it is morally problematic to inflict serious, preventable harms upon others without their consent. - Asheel Singh, Assessing anti-natalism: a philosophical examination of the morality of procreation, University of Johannesburg, 2012, p. 5 - Smith Martin Books about antintalism: No Baby No Cry, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013 Quotes: "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins." (Zechariah Chafee) Strangely when it comes to procreating, exactly the opposite seems to be the case; couples who do not have children are questioned, procreators get an automatic green flag – a pat on the back from friends and relatives, plus tax breaks from the government. I have even heard it described as "giving the gift of life". - Martin Smith, No Baby No Cry, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, p. 6 - If you are having difficulty making the connection between real world outcomes and your desire to have children, try looking at the world in a new way. When there are job losses at work, imagine that happening to the child you are so set on having. The ugly divorce is someone’s child, both of them. The newscaster announcing a rape, that’s someone’s baby, both the perpetrator and the victim. The car accident you just drove past, the toilet cleaner on minimum wage, the man in the hospital ward dying of cancer, the casket being lowered into the ground. If I were to provide an exhaustive list it would fill the whole book, but I would rather you made your own - play this game for a week and it will break your rose tinted spectacles - it’s not happy but it is honest. - Martin Smith, No Baby No Cry, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, p. 12 - By creating a life we subject that person to the harms of life. People will be hurt, some very badly. It seems to me that the only reason for creating lives is to fulfil psychological (and sometimes material) needs of the parents (and to some degree other relatives). It would take libraries to list the gamut of possible harms , ranging from genetic recombination errors at conception, to the last gasp of the dying. We deploy an array of mental gymnastics to avoid the implications of this truth, yet deep down we all know it at some level. Contrary to the norms of our society the arrival of a child should be a time for sober reflection not cause for celebration. I will not congratulate people on gambling someone else's welfare in the hopes of improving their own lives. I suspect most people reading this will hold that their own needs are a good enough reason to have children. If that is you, then I ask you at least acknowledge the self centred nature of the choice, and perhaps when your children are old enough you can explain why you took a flutter on life's roulette wheel. - Martin Smith, No Baby No Cry, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, p. 19 - If you hold eternal damnation, then having children is a very grave business indeed. You are gambling with infinite stakes. - Martin Smith, No Baby No Cry, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, pp. 30-31 - Smith Robert Quotes: I've never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else. - Robert Smith, The Cure's Robert Smith: 'I'm uncomfortable with politicised musicians', The Guardian, 10.09.2011 - Sophocles Quotes: Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay To trace the backward way. For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain for ever pain; And none escapes life's coils. Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life. Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage Of unregarded age, Joyless, companionless and slow, Of woes the crowning woe. - Choir - Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 401 BC - Soriano Giovanni Quotes: Every man and every woman can save human life simply by avoiding conception. - Giovanni Soriano, Maldetti. Pensieri in soluzione acida, Edizioni Joker, Novi Ligure 2007 - In every newspaper there is more than enough reasons to discourage a reasonable man to procreate, but still... - Giovanni Soriano, Finche c'e vita non c'e speranza. Diario aforistico 2003-2009, Kimerik, Patti 2010 - "Be fruitul and multiply" is a recomendation that fits more into god of rabbits than to god of humans. No offense to rabbits, of course. - Giovanni Soriano, Finche c'e vita non c'e speranza. Diario aforistico 2003-2009, Kimerik, Patti 2010 - There is no such thing as a responsible parent, how a responsible parent knowing the world can give life to a child? - Giovanni Soriano, Malomondo. In lode della stupidita, Fazi, Roma 2013 - If commendable is a decision of non-eating meat in order to not cause suffering, for the same reason commendable is a decision of non-bringing another meat into this world through procreation. - Giovanni Soriano, Malomondo. In lode della stupidita, Fazi, Roma 2013 - Procreation is an act far more authoritarian than killing; and just as one should not take the life of someone else, one should also not impose life on someone else. - Giovanni Soriano, Malomondo. In lode della stupidita, Fazi, Roma 2013 - Srivastava Pikesh Books about antinatalism: Glimpses of Truth: Morality, Karma, Procreation, Thomson Press, Okhla, New Delhi 2017 Quotes: Pain, harm, suffering, uncertainty, and death are inseparable from human life. May one impose such evils upon an innocent, who has not consented to be placed in a situation that carries any kind of risk? Is procreation really as "straightforward" and "morally innocent" an activity as custom typically makes it out to be? - Pikesh Srivastava, Glimpses of Truth: Morality, Karma, Procreation, Thomson Press, Okhla, New Delhi 2017, p. 332 - "Life is beautiful. I love it. So what if it comes with harms? Learn to live life to the fullest and don't wallow in the bad parts. The best parts of life outweigh the bad." Allow me draw a paraell. "Smoking cigarettes is enjoyable. I love it. So what if it comes with harms? Win some, lose some. The pleasure far outweighs the harm it causes." Though one is entitled to hold such views, it does nothing to alter the truth: smoking is injurious to health; all in all, a harmful habit best avoided. You may enjoy smoking, and think it worth all the risks that accompany it, but do you have a right to force such a habit on another? In creating a child, one is doing just that – forcing life on another, without their consent, unmindful of the harms they are subjecting them to. And let the reader not forget – the risks that accompany smoking are a picnic compared to the countless harms life exposes us to. - Pikesh Srivastava, Glimpses of Truth: Morality, Karma, Procreation, Thomson Press, Okhla, New Delhi 2017, pp. 369-370 - Szilagyi Domokos I am thirty-six years old. What am I waiting for? Probably for death. My past is as intense as my future orphaned. And I will soon be a carrion – I am a madman; I have been working on it since I was dragged out of my mother. I know about it for a long time and I want this, unfortunately, I think so. Because I already have enough. I say – you know. The earth will deliver those who had doubts about the existence who never gave birth and never killed. - Domokos Szilagyi, 1974 - Tanner Julia Articles about antinatalism: Better Not to Have Children, Think 2011, volume 10, issue 27, pp. 113-121 Quotes: -> Harrison Gerald Tatian the Assyrian Quotes about Tatian the Assyrian: A certain person inveighs against generation, calling it corruptible and destructive; and some one does violence [to Scripture], applying to procreation the Saviour's words, "Lay not up treasure on earth, where moth and rust corrupt"; and he is not ashamed to add to these the words of the prophet: "You all shall grow old as garment, and the moth shall devour you." - Alexander Roberts, The Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A. D. 325 Volume II, Fathers of the Second Century, Hermas, Tatian, Theophilus, Athenago, Cosimo, 2007, p. 82 - Thales of Miletus Quotes about Thales of Miletus: When he was asked why he has no children his reply was: Because I love children! - Diogenes Laertios, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 3rd century AD - Theognis of Megara Quotes: Best of all for mortal beings is never to have been born at all. Nor ever to have set eyes on the bright light of the sun. - Theognis of Megara, Greek Elegiac Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC. Tyrtaeus, Solon, Theognis, and Others, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1999, p. 234 - Tolstoy Lev Quotes: "But how," I asked, "would the human race continue?" "Yes, would not the human race perish?" he said, irritably and ironically, as if he had expected this familiar and insincere objection. "Teach abstention from child-bearing so that English lords may always gorge themselves – that is all right. Preach it for the sake of greater pleasure – that is all right; but just hint at abstention from child-bearing in the name of morality – and, my goodness, what a rumpus...! Isn't there a danger that the human race may die out because they want to cease to be swine? But forgive me! This light is unpleasant, may I shade it?" he said, pointing to the lamp. I said I did not mind; and with the haste with which he did everything, he got up on the seat and drew the woollen shade over the lamp. "All the same," I said, "if everyone thought this the right thing to do, the human race would cease to exist." He did not reply at once. "You ask how the human race will continue to exist," he said, having again sat down in front of me, and spreading his legs far apart he leant his elbows on his knees. "Why should it continue?" "Why? If not, we should not exist." "And why should we exist?" "Why? In order to live, of course." "But why live? If life has no aim, if life is given us for life's sake, there is no reason for living. And if it is so, then the Schopenhauers, the Hartmanns, and all the buddhists as well, are quite right. But if life has an aim, it is clear that it ought to come to an end when that aim is reached. and so it turns out," he said with a noticeable agitation, evidently prizing his thought very highly. "So it turns out. Just think: if the aim of humanity is goodness, righteousness, love – call it what you will – if it is what the prophets have said, that all mankind should be united together in love, that the spears should be beaten into pruning hooks and so forth, what is it that hinders the attainment of this aim? The passions hinder it. Of all the passions the strongest, cruellest, and most stubborn is the sex-passion, physical love; and therefore if the passions are destroyed, including the strongest of them physical love – the prophecies will be fulfilled, mankind will be brought into a unity, the aim of human existence will be attained, and there will be nothing further to live for. As long as mankind exists the ideal is before it, and of course not the rabbits' and pigs' ideal of breeding as fast as possible, nor that of monkeys or Parisians – to enjoy sex-passion in the most refined manner, but the ideal of goodness attained by continence and purity. Towards that people have always striven and still strive. - Lev Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, Oxford University Press, New York 1998 (1889), pp. 109-110 - Tonnessen Herman Books about antinatalism: Jeg velger sannheten: En dialog mellom Peter Wessel Zapffe og Herman Tonnessen, Universitets forlaget, Oslo 1983, co-author with Peter Wessel Zapffe (Norwegian language) Quotes: If we can't genetically fix our nature I agree with Zapffe. To leave world to a deserted behind is better than to continue this grotesque carousel of procreation. - Interview, Gataavisa, issue 103 (8/1984) - Tremblay Francois Books about antinatalism: A New Approach to Procreative Ethics, Lulu, 2017 Quotes: Vallejo Fernando Quotes: Heaven and happiness do not exist. That's your parents' way to justify the crime of having brought you into this world. What exists is reality, the tough reality, this slaughterhouse we've come to die in, if not to kill and to eat the animals, our fellow creatures. Therefore, do not reproduce, do not repeat the crimes committed against you, do not give back the same, evil paid with evil, as imposing life is the ultimate crime. Do not disturb the unborn, let them be in the peace of nothingness, anyway we'll all eventually go back there, so why beat around the bush? - Luis Ospina, La desazon suprema: Retrato de Fernando Vallejo, 2003 - Those I've most loved are my grandma Raquel Pizano and my dog Bruja. I also loved my dad. But after all he is guilty of imposing on me the burden of life. Life's a burden, it's a curse. Those who I loved, now dead, drag me to the grave. It's very hard to carry on without them. The only way I can live is by forgetting them. - Luis Ospina, La desazon suprema: Retrato de Fernando Vallejo, 2003 - My concept of sexuality is very simple: every voluntary sexual act not leading to reproduction is innocent. Sexuality does not matter. The crime is when it leads to reproduction. - Sala de prensa, Streap tease de Fernando Vallejo, 2008 - Nobody has the right to impose existence to someone else, it's the most terrible crime. - Patricia Kolesnicov, Clarin, Encuentro Con Vallejo, Pero es que yo vivo en el terror, 18.01.2003 - Sex is something innocent, procreation is a crime. - Patricia Kolesnicov, Clarin, Encuentro Con Vallejo, Pero es que yo vivo en el terror, 18.01.2003 - Nobody has the right to extract from the peaceful nonexistence those who did not ask for it. - Tomasz Pindel, Błękitne dni, Vallejo, Fernando, Gazeta Wyborcza 29.08.2006 - Verrecchia Anacleto Quotes: All this disgrace derive from being born, which therefore is the greatest of all catastrophes. - Anacleto Verrecchia, Diario del Gran Paradiso, Fogola, Torino 1997 The only misfortune of those who have never been born is that they know nothing about their fortune. - Anacleto Verrecchia, Rapsodia viennese, Donzelli, Roma 2003 - Vetter Hermann Articles about antinatalism: The production of children as a problem for utilitarian ethics, Inquiry 12, 1969, pp. 445-447 Utilitarianism and New Generations, Minds, 1971, 80 (318), pp. 301-302 Quotes: There is no moral reasons for starting someone's existence on account of the happiness he would experience. (...) There is a moral reason for not starting someone's existence on account of the unhappiness he would experience. - Hermann Vetter, The production of children as a problem for utilitarian ethics, Inquiry 12, 1969, p. 446 - Adoption could help if practised on a much larger scale than nowadays, such that any child not definitely wanted by its parents, or born in unafavourable social circumstances, could be adopted by people who want children but do not want to create them for that purpose. - Hermann Vetter, The production of children as a problem for utilitarian ethics, Inquiry 12, 1969, p. 447 - In any case, it is morally preferable not to produce a child. This requires that in any individual encounter, and by any institutional activity in education, mass media, economic and legal policy, people should be discouraged from having children. If such tendencies are successful enough, the number of men on earth may begin to decrease, and if such development continues long enough, the human race will disappear. This, however, would not at all be a deplorable consequence according to Narveson's and my own opinion: the existence of mankind is not a value in itself. On the contrary, if mankind ceases to exist, all suffering is extinguished perfectly, which no other human endeavour will be able to bring about. On the other hand, of course, all happy experiences of men will disappear. But this, according to Narveson's conclusion, would not be deplorable, because no human subject would exist which would be deprived of the happy experiences. - Hermann Vetter, Utilitarianism and New Generations, Minds, 1971, 80 (318), pp. 302-303 - Vichy-Chamrond Marie Anne de Quotes: All conditions and all circumstances seem equally unfortunate to me, from the angel to the oyster. The grievous thing is to be born. - Kathleen Norris, Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, Letter to Voltaire, 1759, Penguin Books, London 2008 - Vinding Magnus Articles about antinatalism: The Speciesism of Leaving Nature Alone, and the Theoretical Case for "Wildlife AntiNatalism", 2017 Quotes: We cannot allow ourselves to spuriously rationalize away the suffering that takes place in nature, and to forget the victims of the horrors of nature merely because that reality does not fit into our convenient moral theories, theories that ultimately just serve to make us feel consistent and good about ourselves in the face of an incomprehensibly bad reality. - Magnus Vinding, The Speciesism of Leaving Nature Alone, and the Theoretical Case for "Wildlife Anti-Natalism" - Voltaire Quotes: Life has so few charms! And yet we desire it. No more pleasure, no more power, in the horrors of death. A dead lion is not worth a midge that breathes. O unfortunate mortal! Whether your soul is enjoying the moment given to you, or whether death is ending it, both are torture. It is better not to have been born. - Voltaire, Precis de Ecclesiaste, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, volume 29, issue 4, 2005 - Voluntary Human Extinction Movement -> Knight Les U. Weininger Otto Quotes: Every form of fecundity is loathsome, and no one who is honest with himself feels bound to provide for the continuity of the human race. And what we do not realise to be a duty, is not a duty. On the contrary, it is immoral to procreate a human being for any secondary reason, to bring a being into the limitations of humanity, the conditions made for him by his parentage; the fundamental question why the possible freedom and spontaneity of a human being is limited is that he was begotten in such a limited fashion. That the human race should persist is of no interest whatsoever to reason; he who would perpetuate humanity would perpetuate the problem and the guilt; the only problem and the only guilt. - Otto Weininger, Sex & Character, W. Heinemann, 1906, p. 346 - Weisberg David -> Cook Douglas Wisdom of Silenus Quotes: Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is – to die soon. - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth Of Tragedy, Courier Dover Publications, New York 2012 (1872), p. 8 - Wisnowska Maria Quotes: Not to be born is the first step to happiness. If someone by unhappy accident is here on Earth, one thing should comfort him; he will return to the original state. - Agata Tuszynska, Wydawnictwo Ksiazkowe Twoj Styl, Warszawa, 2003 - Woolf Virginia Quotes: One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that. - Septimus Warren Smith - Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Interactive Media, 2012 (1925), p. 70 - Yanase Naoki Quotes: Simply put, upon a nihilistic basis, I deeply believe that making children is nothing but a hopeless action. This thought can not possibly be removed, and I no longer care to remove it. In terms of pleasure, humans are unpredictable when they will drown in it, and for this reason, one should not create children to avoid getting them entangled in the mess. Children are, horrifyingly, just thrown out into this world as a result of egoistical adults who craves pleasure, with the child's life having attributed meaning afterwards so arbitrarily. - 翻訳からの回路, Hakuyosha, 1984 - Zapffe Peter Wessel Articles about antinatalism: The Last Messiah, Philosophy Now 2004 (1933), number 45 Books about antinatalism: Om det tragiske, Pax Forlag, Oslo 1996 (1941) (Norwegian language) Jeg velger sannheten: En dialog mellom Peter Wessel Zapffe og Herman Tønnessen, Oslo, Universitets forlaget 1983, co-author with Herman Tønnessen (Norwegian language) Quotes: The sign of doom is written on your brows how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks? But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution. Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye. - Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah, Philosophy Now, march/april 2004 (1933) - You got me. But my child you will not get. You were committing a fateful mistake when assigning even procreation to my will. And you did not do this out of love..., but rather to burden me with the heaviest of all responsibilities...: Am I to perpetuate this species or not? And from now on I will ask no longer what you want; rather you shall ask what I want. And I will no longer offer further sacrifices to the God of life. I will punish you with the ability you bequeathed to me in order to torment me; I will turn my clairvoyance against you and thus bereaving you of your victims. And the abused millions will stand behind me like a plough... And evermore will two people create one human being... Thus you will feel your powerlessness begging me on thy bloody knees. - Peter Wessel Zapffe, Om det tragiske, Pax Forlag, Oslo 1996, p. 239, translated by Karim Akerma - I will have to desist from the creation of new holders of interest. This decision would initialise a terminal epoch in the development of humankind; (...) This renouncement, this refusal of a continuation represents the utmost cultural possibility of mankind. - Peter Wessel Zapffe, Om det tragiske, Pax Forlag, Oslo 1996, p. 402, translated by Karim Akerma - Above all, we must make the reproductive question ethically relevant. A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness. - Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays og epistler, Gyldendal, Oslo 1967 - The sooner humanity dares to harmonise itself with its biological predicament, the better. And this means to willingly withdraw in contempt for its worldly terms, just as the heatcraving species went extinct when temperatures dropped. To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable, and a two-child policy could make our discontinuance a painfree one. Yet instead we are expanding and succeeding everywhere, as necessity has taught us to mutilate the formula in our hearts. Perhaps the most unreasonable effect of such invigorating vulgarisation is the doctrine that the individual "has a duty" to suffer nameless agony and a terrible death if this saves or benefits the rest of his group. Anyone who declines is subjected to doom and death, instead of the revulsion being directed at the worldorder engendering the situation. To any independent observer, this plainly is to juxtapose incommensurable things; no future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the survivors storm ahead toward new bland sensations and mass deaths. - Interview by Henning Sinding-Larsen, Aftenposten 1959, in: Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, Hippocampus Press, New York 2010, p. 23 - For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet. - Nina Witoszek, Andrew Brennan, Philosophical Dialogues, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland 1999, page 192 - To have children, to let a fate come into existence – perhaps a whole series of fates without any limitation in time – is a project so heavily burdened with inevitable evils and enormous risks (physically and psychologically) that potential parents endowed with a fully developed sense of responsibility will tend towards passivity or show themselves incapable of acting. - Interview by Geir T.H. Eriksen, Gateavisa N 102 (7/84), p. 30, translated by Karim Akerma - To bear children into this world is like carrying wood into a burning house. - Haagen Ringnes, Reflekser i trylleglass: stemmer fra vart arhundre, JW Cappelens Forlag, Oslo 1998, p. 96 - From the no to life immediately follows that one stops procreation. I do not want to participate in the creation of new life. - Interview by Av Bo Viuf, 1988/1989, translated by Karim Akerma - In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation. - Trond Brede Andersen, Hva det betyr at vaere menneske, 1990 - Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will. - Trond Brede Andersen, Hva det betyr at vaere menneske, 1990 - Zizek Slavoy Quotes: I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born – but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it. - Q&A, Slavoj Zizek, professor and writer, Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet, The Guardian, 9 Aug 2008 - Websites http://philosopherjuliocabrera.blogspot.com – Julio Cabrera's website https://misantropiaemelancolia.wordpress.com – Joshua Queiros' website http://demonsanddiscourses.blogspot.com – Darthbarracuda's old website https://negativesincerity.wordpress.com – Darthbarracuda's new website https://pieknoigroza.blogspot.com – Richard Zimmerman's website http://wieczneauschwitz.blogspot.com – Richard Zimmerman's website http://www.akerma.de – Karim Akerma's website https://antinatalismblog.wordpress.com – Karim Akerma's website http://theophiledegiraud.e-monsite.com – Theophile de Giraud's website http://planetzapffe.com – Andreas Nilssen Moss' website http://www.ligotti.net – website about Thomas Ligotti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism – article about antinatalism on Wikipedia https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/catPurrNoiseGenerator.php – cat purring simulator