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Jacob M. Appel

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Jacob M. Appel (born February 21, 1973, in New York City) is an American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic.

Quotes

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  • I have vicarious morning sickness. Other people's babies make me nauseous.
    • The Magic Laundry (2015)[1]
  • I would prefer to believe that a market in fetal organs would empower women to use their reproductive capabilities to their own economic advantage.
  • Depression and hopelessness are not the only reasons terminally ill patients wish to end their lives. Many individuals see nothing undignified about choosing to end their lives at the time and manner of their choosing — and many view such a choice as the meaningful culmination of a good life.
  • Victory [over homophobia] may require five or maybe 20 years. Yet I have no doubt that "don't ask, don't tell" and same-sex adoption bans will be as unspeakable and inexplicable to my grandchildren as counting a slave as three-fifths of a human being.
  • Much as we do not permit convicted pedophiles to teach kindergarten or convicted hijackers to board airplanes, common sense dictates that individuals who have been imprisoned for plotting violence against abortion clinics should never again be permitted anywhere near such facilities.
  • I am grateful that I have rights in the proverbial public square--but, as a practical matter, my most cherished rights are those that I possess in my bedroom and hospital room and death chamber.
  • Most people are far more concerned that they can control their own bodies than they are about petitioning Congress.
  • The cold, cruel reality is that with one current justice now approaching ninety, and four others over seventy, the day will inevitably arrive when a sitting justice lies in an intensive care unit, both unable to resign and unable to resume his or her duties.
  • Much as constitutional guarantees of press freedom do little good for prospective publishers if they do not have access to paper or ink, the right to aid in dying is strikingly useless if nobody is willing to help.
  • There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery.
  • Money spent on vegetative patients is money not spent on preventive care, such as flu shots and mammograms. Each night in an ICU bed for such patients is a night that another patient with a genuine prognosis for recovery is denied such high-end care. Every dollar exhausted on patients who will never wake up again is a dollar not devoted to finding a cure for cancer.
  • While the visible victims may draw the headlines and attract indignant protests from so-called "pro-life" organizations, the invisible victims are people like you and me who will suffer from diseases that are never cured because funds are being poured down a healthcare sieve in order to maintain permanently-unconscious bodies on complex and costly forms of life support.
  • I suspect that the vast majority of people, not knowing in advance whether they will either end up in a permanently vegetative state or be diagnosed with cancer, would prefer that any resources that would be spent on PVS care be reallocated to cancer research--or some similar enterprise that has the potential to help human beings who might actually recover.
  • Always warm up the audience with a joke....If you are not a particularly funny person, make sure that you inform them that it's a joke....
    • Sphinx Society lecture, Brown University, April 3, 2003 (as reported in the Brown Daily Herald)
  • The boss is never your friend, even if you're sleeping with him.
  • Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you're going on a date.
  • If you give a man a hammer, he thinks he can solve all problems by pounding. Well, God gave men penises....
  • If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty.
    • The Replacement (2006)

The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (2012)

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[ISBN: 978-190-888-551-1]
  • One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy. (Page 5)
  • Nixon’s offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving.
  • Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.
  • You delude yourself that you live in a free country because you never test the boundaries of that freedom.
  • It was all about borders. And Arnold was on the wrong side of them. He’d end up spending the rest of his life in a 8’ x 10’ cell, another darling of the Left like Mumia Abu-Jamal or Lisl Auman, because he happened to be standing on one side of an arbitrary political boundary, a line as imaginary as the equator.

The Biology of Luck (2013)

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[ISBN: 978-0975374689]
  • Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer.
  • The only thing more difficult than persuading someone else to start having sex with you is persuading yourself to stop.

On Presidential Health Ratings

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  • “For recent presidents, especially those still living, there is always the possibility, a rather strong one, that we will discover additional information that is presently known to physicians and presidents but not to the general public...Almost all of the modern presidents would have been rated higher and looked healthier on paper while in office than they do in retrospect with the benefit of information not released during their terms.”
    • Every president’s health, ranked, Vox (2018-16-18)
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References

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  1. ↑ Appel, Jacob M. The Magic Laundry Snake Nation Press 2015
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