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There is a time for everything, also for my time in politics which has been long and eventful. Now I believe it is time for others to take the baton that was passed to me following the crash. I have therefore decided to leave political life at the end of this term.

When I'm not a politician, I'll be dead.

Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.

I live for now, not for what happens after I die.

I've thought a lot about how if something horrible happened, and if it were like 'The Road' situation, I've decided I don't want to survive past the death of society as we know it.

When you are a politician, it means to work for the benefit of the country, not to stay home. In politics, it ends only when one dies.

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.

But what you could perhaps do with in these days is a word of most sincere sympathy. Your movement is carried internally by so strong a truth and necessity that victory in one form or another cannot elude you for long.

I hope to live long enough to see my surviving comrades march side by side with the Union veterans along Pennsylvania Avenue, and then I will die happy.

I may not be a politician, but I will fight to the end of my life for what I believe in.