"They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience."
Which is a great attitude to take until you run into someone who's okay with having your dead body.
Killing the person you are to keep a person you're not alive for a bit and then still dying at some point seems like a really bad trade-off to me; and if all people always had thought that way, you and I would have been born chained to a wall.