Antinatalism 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: The Essays

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“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

“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

“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.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays og Epistler

“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

“Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

“A premature death does not only rob one of the countless instances where one would have experienced pleasure, it also saves one from the innumerable instances where one would have experienced pain.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A pregnant woman is a frightful object. A new-born child is loathsome. A deathbed rarely makes so horrible an impression as childbirth, that terrible symphony of screams and filth and blood.”
― Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

“I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Not having children derives not from dislike, but from love too great to bring them into this world, too limited, too vain, too cruel.”
― Michel Onfray, Les vertus de la foudre

“But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.”
― Paul Harding, Enon

“It is not the case that one can create new people on the assumption that if they are not pleased to have come into existence they can simply kill themselves. Once somebody has come into existence and attachments with that person have been formed, suicide can cause the kind of pain that makes the pain of childlessness mild by comparison. Somebody contemplating suicide knows (or should know) this. This places an important obstacle in the way of suicide. One’s life may be bad, but one must consider what affect ending it would have on one’s family and friends. There will be times when life has become so bad that it is unreasonable for the interests of the loved ones in having the person alive to outweigh that person’s interests in ceasing to exist. When this is true will depend in part on particular features of the person for whom continued life is a burden. Different people are able to bear different magnitudes of burden. It may even be indecent for family members to expect that person to continue living. On other occasions one’s life may be bad but not so bad as to warrant killing oneself and thereby making the lives of one’s family and friends still much worse than they already are.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“What foolishness it is to desire more life, after one has tasted
A bit of it and seen the world; for each day, after each endless day,
Piles up ever more misery into a mound. As for pleasures: once we
Have passed youth they vanish away, never again to be seen.
Death is the end of all.
Never to be born is the best thing. To have seen the daylight
And be swept instantly back into dark oblivion comes second.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

“We celebrate life and mourn death. Yet life create death, and death create life. Every cradle is a grave. Why not celebrate death and mourn life?”
― Pelle Skogsberg

“Every time a man is begotten and born the clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I

“Those who have been pulled out of the calm tranquility of the void and trapped for life to a bodily existence have a single consolation: everything that lives, also dies. Sooner or later, the tragedy will be forever over. Every life is destined to return to the sweet nothing from which it emerged without its consent. This is our consolation.”
― Selim Güre, The Occult of the Unborn

“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. The implication of this is that the avoidance of the bad by never existing is a real advantage over existence, whereas the loss of certain goods by not existing is not a real disadvantage over never existing.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“Overpopulation is by far the worst kind of pollution.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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 M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our being, we react like God, we are God.
It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“If we were internally or intrinsically valuable, we should have complete consciousness of our value without needing external acknowledgment.”
― Julio Cabrera, Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation

“Everyone dies of something. And we can't bury ourselves. This means that for every human being who has ever lived, someone must discover and dispose of the body. It is mistaken to attribute this harm only to suicides. It is part of our humanity that we - suicides and non-suicides alike - must inflict this harm on others. Once we have been given the dubious gift of life, we are destined to burden someone with the disposal of our dead body.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“The problem is that little of this" company and support "(and reproductive capacity) is morally obligatory. A person may, without committing a moral wrong by modern standards, leave his spouse due to irreconcilable differences or move away from his friends and relatives to pursue a career or refuse to have children. Providing our company is a voluntary act, and we are under no moral obligation to do so. The company and support of a person is best viewed as a privilege, not a right-with the important exception of a person's voluntarily conceived children (there is a moral duty to care for one's children that renders the suicide of a parent of dependent children, rebuttably, wrong”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Many people are so miserable that they do not want to enter the future at all. Their whole future projected life is worthless to them. In technical terms, their utility over all future time intervals, appropriately discounted, is less than zero. Also, their current utility (present circumstance) is zero or negative (otherwise they'd stick around a bit longer to pick up extra utility).
• Suicide is one option for such people. But there are two other options, according to Becker & Posner (terminology is mine):
• Take what you have and "bet" it on a chance at something that would make life worth living. If it fails, you can always kill yourself. (Gamble)
• Since there is an element of uncertainty to the future, take what you have and use it to make the present livable so you can postpone suicide. Something to make life worth living might be just around the corner. If not, you can always kill yourself. (Palliate & Wait)”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

“Extinction, while sad and scary, doesn't bother me as much as does the suffering of the individuals prior to being wiped out.”
― Henriette Mantel, No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood

“Here comes the ghost who made me, the ax still in his skull. Keep your hat on, I know you've got one hole too many. I would my mother had one less when you were still of flesh: I would have been spared myself. Women should be sewed up—a world without mothers. We could butcher each other in peace and quiet, and with some confidence, if life gets too long for us or our throats too tight for our screams.”
― Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine

“Tu es entré dans le monde étrange des compositions et des décompositions chimiques: ta vie et ta mort terrestres, agrégations et désagrégations continuelles, jusqu'au jour où il ne restera plus la moindre trace, le moindre souvenir de cette chose immonde qui sera ton cadavre.
Aussi je ne sais quel fou trouvait-il avec raison à cette atmosphère terrestre une désagréable odeur de cimetière, odeur inquiétante, disait-il, et que ne pouvait dissimuler le bizarre et angélique parfum des fleurs.”
― Henri Cazalis, Le Livre du Néant: Pensées Douloureuses ou Bouffonnes; Le Ciel d'Orient; Remembrance; L'Illusion