"Death is a poor way of getting rid of one's enemy"--Interesting Random Facts
I picked up this quotation some years ago while listening to This Sceptred Isle.  Charles James Fox said it when his famous archrival Pitt the Younger died.  The full quotation:

Fox, Pitt's great political rival, observed that death "was a poor way of getting rid of one's enemy."

It's one of those quotes that, the more I think about it, the more I realize how true it is.  Everybody dies.  You will die, I will die.   So the idea that you've someone defeated someone when they die is stupid.  You're only a few years away from the same fate yourself.

Moreover, if you have to wait for natural causes to take away your enemy, then it's an indication that you yourself were impotent to do anything about them.
The preferred way to get rid of your enemy is to win against them while they are still alive: demolish their logic, humiliate their arguments, deconvert their followers, politically out-maneuver them.  This is a way of getting rid of your enemy that you can be proud of.

If you just have to wait around for them to die, well... that's no credit to you, is it?
And I think that's what Charles James Fox meant.  Of all the ways to get rid of your enemies, death is the worst one.

I thought about this quote today when I saw everyone rejoicing on Twitter and Facebook about Rush Limbaugh's cancer diagnosis.

But I also thought it was worth bookmarking this quote on the blog for further reference.  There are a lot of polemical figures in the world who statistically are probably going to die of natural causes in the next 50 years or so.  And with each of these cases, we're probably going to see the same sort of dialogue play out on Twitter and Facebook. So it's worth remembering, just as a permanent truism: death is a poor way of getting rid of your enemies.