Did Luffy Really Say “When Do You Think People Die? When They Are Forgotten”?

No. The speech that asks when a person dies, runs through gunshots and disease and poisonous soup, and answers "when they are forgotten," is not Monkey D. Luffy's. It belongs to Dr. Hiriluk, a doctor on Drum Island.

The verdict

Misattributed. Wikiquote's One Piece page records the whole speech in its Drum Island season under Hiriluk, from the question through the list of ways people do not die to the answer: a man dies when people forget him. Every source that gives it a scene gives it to Hiriluk, in the flashback to his death, where Dalton is the one who weeps at it. Luffy is not the speaker. He is not even in the flashback. The attribution to him comes from quote collections titled with his name that sweep up every memorable One Piece line.

Whose line it is

Hiriluk is a doctor and former thief who believes a country can be cured, and the speech is his answer to the question of why a dying man keeps working. He is saying that the cure for his own death is to be remembered, and then he goes and dies in a way that guarantees it. The line's power depends entirely on the man saying it being about to die. Put in Luffy's mouth it becomes a slogan about legacy from a teenager; in Hiriluk's it is a will. Hiriluk's page on this site carries the compact version with its source.

How Luffy got the credit

The usual way: quote sites organize by the famous face, and a "Luffy quotes" page will take the series' best line regardless of who said it, the same drift that put a Might Guy line under Naruto's name.

What this site does with it

The Hiriluk entry quotes the speech's answer, in the wording Wikiquote's transcript records. Luffy's own verified lines, including the one about being King of the Pirates, are on his page, and one of the invented Luffy lines this database has already caught, the one about forgetting being a wound, is worth reading beside this one: the theme of memory keeps getting attached to him, and it keeps belonging to someone else. The film line about taking risks, by contrast, is his.

How we checked

The verification process asks for a primary or editorial source, and Wikiquote's episode-numbered page supplies the speaker and the scene. Nothing attributes the speech to Luffy with a scene, because in no scene does he say it. The entry in the fact-check database is misattributed, and the rest of the series' verified lines are on the One Piece hub.