Nice quote, but...<p>&quot;The Earth belongs in usufruct to the living; the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.&quot; --Thomas Jefferson, to James Madison, Sep 6, 1789<p>For all the influence exerted by people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., they effected change with their lives, and not their deaths.  One should not choose to die for a cause, or against one.  Rather, live for your own principles, and teach them to those others who wish to learn.  Those who sacrifice themselves, expecting no reward, grow no greater in my eyes.  They become memory, and immediately begin to fade, except to the extent that they are renewed by those who still live.<p>What manner of scoundrel would I be to suggest that another to sacrifice for my benefit, that I may treasure the memory of it?  What sort of fool would assent?  That is the mentality of the beehive, where the workers die to protect their queen.  In a society of equals, for anyone to die unnecessarily is a tragedy.  For someone to choose to die, it is a horror.<p>Attributing some nobility to self-sacrifice is an ethic for hierarchies, to convince the lesser people, against their own interests, to hurtle headstrong into situations where they may be killed.  It makes pawns of people who might otherwise be greater.  It is not fitting to convince anyone to believe they are so unworthy that the best way they might serve others is by throwing themselves into fires that need never have been lit.