The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.
Meaning of the quote
This quote suggests that the main difference between someone killing themselves and someone dying for a cause is how much attention or publicity their actions receive. If no one knows about it, it's just a suicide. But if it's covered extensively by the media, it may be seen as a heroic act of martyrdom instead.
More quotes from Chuck Palahniuk
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.
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Every woman is just a different kind of problem.
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Masochism is a valuable job skill.
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If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?
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Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
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Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished.
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I don’t care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.
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The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
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The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage.
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Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
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All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
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Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
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I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
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The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
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When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
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Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
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I just don’t want to die without a few scars.
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You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.
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People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.
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What we don’t understand we can make mean anything.
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More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself.
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Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.
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We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
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You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.
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If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
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No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
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You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake… This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
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Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?
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We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
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Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that’s usually how you end up crying?
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It’s funny how you never think about the women you’ve had. It’s always the ones who get away that you can’t forget.
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Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
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Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
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That saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
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If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.
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A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
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The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly.
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The answer is there is no answer.
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Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
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I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.
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If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
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Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
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Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there.
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Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
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People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
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Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.
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Only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.
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Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do, and you get screwed.
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