Linus Pauling — "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Satisfaction at an enemy's death without personal guilt — this is pure schadenfreude delivered with wit. The speaker admits harboring real animosity toward specific people yet maintained enough restraint to never act on it. Reading their obituary becomes a quiet victory. It normalizes a feeling most people hide: relief, even delight, when someone who made your life harder finally disappears from it permanently.
Relevance to Linus Pauling
Pauling accumulated formidable enemies: FBI director Hoover surveilled him for decades, the Senate hauled him before McCarthy-era committees, and the State Department revoked his passport in 1952. Scientific rivals dismissed his vitamin C research. Yet he outlived most of them, collecting two Nobel Prizes along the way. This wry confession of obituary-reading pleasure fits a man who endured decades of institutional hostility and still watched his persecutors fade into history.
The era
Pauling reached prominence during the Cold War, when scientists who opposed nuclear weapons faced government retaliation. McCarthyism labeled peace activists as communist sympathizers; his passport was seized to prevent him attending a Royal Society event in 1952. He spent years under FBI surveillance. In that climate, prominent bureaucrats who hounded dissenting scientists did eventually die, and for those who survived the era's paranoia, their obituaries carried genuine weight.
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