Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

Death deceives relations often, and doctors sometimes, but the patient - never.

But we have gone so far in the direction of over treating terminal patients that we've failed to recognize when we're doing more harm than good.

The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

The Doctor's Motto: Have patients.

President Obama says he will not support a healthcare plan where the government gets to decide whether to, quote, 'pull the plug on Grandma.' Apparently, Obama's plan calls for the much quicker pillow option.

I wonder how often not the intention but the desire springs up in a doctor's mind: 'Can I let this human being out of the trap of Life?

To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.

Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.

Why should anyone - the state, the medical profession, or anyone else - presume to tell someone else how much suffering they must endure as their life is ending?

There's a sort of decency among the dead, a remarkable discretion: you never find them making any complaint against the doctor who killed them!

The physician, to the extent he is a physician, considers only the good of the patient in what he prescribes, and his own not at all

We're going to use Terri Schiavo later on. This is going to be an issue in 2006 and it's going to be an issue in 2008, because we're going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, "Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not, or is that going to be up to your loved ones?

The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.

Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

In legal parlance, that is called 'the rational person test,' ... That's where somebody else says, 'Even though we have no idea what this person would want in this circumstance in which they cannot themselves tell us what they want, a 'rational' person - meaning, myself - in that circumstance would want to die.' So you move very quickly from so-called voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia. These legal and medical developments are not simply hypothetical They're in the courts right now.

The choice of euthanasia becomes more serious when it takes the form of a murder committed by others on a person who has in no way requested it and who has never consented to it. The height of arbitrariness and injustice is reached when certain people, such as physicians or legislators, arrogate to themselves the power to decide who ought to live and who ought to die.

Terrorism grows when there are no other options, and when the center of the global economy is the god of money and not the person - men and women - this is already the first terrorism!

I would have walked on the waterBut I wasn't fully insured.And the BMA sent a writ my wayWith the very first leper I cured.

Machine makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine.

We are guests in our patients' lives.

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.

Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other. We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.

The whole point of getting control of health is to regulate everybody's life and look at how they decide now whether somebody should get treated or not: age, how sick are you, how much it's going to cost to invest in your recovery and are you going to recover. And when the government is in charge of making those decisions and not you and your doctor.