[net.philosophy] Galileo on immortality

lew (02/21/83)

Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, etc. are
reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on
living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that
if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the
world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa's head which would
transmute them into statues of jasper or of diamond, and thus make them
more perfect than they are.

	from "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems"