Suicide
On February 23, 1974, Knowland died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, an apparent suicide, at his summer home near Guerneville, California. His personal life had dismantled around him, with debts to banks totalling $900,000 at the time of his death and a second failed marriage. His funeral was held at First Congregational Church in Oakland. At the service was played the rarely heard Official State Song, "I Love You, California".
Read more about this topic: William F. Knowland
Famous quotes containing the word suicide:
“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)
“Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no scepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)