A suicide booth is a fictional machine for committing suicide. Suicide booths appear in numerous fictional settings, including the American animated series Futurama and the manga Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita. Compulsory self-execution booths were also featured in an episode of the original Star Trek TV series entitled "A Taste of Armageddon."
The concept can be found as early as the 1895 story The Repairer of Reputations by Robert W. Chambers, in which the Governor of New York presides over the opening of the first "Government Lethal Chamber" in New York City in the then-future year of 1920, following the repeal of laws against suicide:
"The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair." He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the street was absolute. "There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life.Writer Martin Amis provoked another small controversy in January 2010 when he advocated "suicide booths" for the elderly, of whom he wrote:
There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops...There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a Martini and a medal.Read more about Suicide Booth: Early Mentions, Star Trek, Futurama, The Simpsons, Battle Angel Alita, Logan's Run, In Reality
Famous quotes containing the words suicide and/or booth:
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“A man’s labour is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilise it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilisation.”
—William Booth (1829–1912)