Eulogy. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead.
Ambrose Bierce

Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
Ambrose Bierce

Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
Ambrose Bierce

A politician is a man who understands government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for 15 years.
Harry S. Truman

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
George Orwell

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.
Marquis de Sade

Call no man happy till he is dead.
Aeschylus

Mourn for me rather as living than as dead.
Aeschylus

If a man suffers ill, let it be without shame; for this is the only profit when we are dead. You will never say a good word about deeds that are evil and disgraceful.
Aeschylus

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
Marcel Proust

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
William Faulkner

Because when they strike it can be that quick that if they're within range, you're dead, you're dead in your tracks. And his head weighs more than my body so it's WHACK!
Steve Irwin

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
William Butler Yeats

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.
William Butler Yeats

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
Aldous Huxley

The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.
Thomas Aquinas