Murder Quotes - Page 3

• We don't murder, we kill.... You don't murder animals, you kill them.

  Samuel Fuller

  Animal

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• You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Style, Fancy, Prose

  Lolita pt. 1, ch. 1 (1955)

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• Lynching is color line murder.

  Ida B. Wells

  Lynching, Color, Lines

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• Murder is terribly exhausting.

  Albert Camus

  Exhausting

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• After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

  Albert Camus

  Death, Running, Risk

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• Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.

  Dr. Seuss

  Children, Writing, Chapters

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• O comfort-killing night, image of hell, Dim register and notary of shame, Black stage for tragedies and murders fell, Vast sin-concealing chaos, nurse of blame!

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Night, Nurse

  William Shakespeare (2006). “The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint”, p.188, Cambridge University Press

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• What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

  P. D. James

  Order, Restoration, Stories

  Quoted in Face, Dec. 1986

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• One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Happens

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• Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?

  Marquis de Sade

  Law, Punishment, Criminals

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• I am certain, however, that those responsible for the murder of millions of Germans will never be brought to justice.

  Adolf Eichmann

  Justice, Responsible, Certain

  "Why? New Eichmann Notes Try to Explain" by Roger Cohen, www.nytimes.com. August 13, 1999.

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• All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment, convince me that in what I have done, I have not prevented a single murder.

  Albert Pierrepoint

  Men, Finals, Done

  Albert Pierrepoint (1974). “Executioner, Pierrepoint”

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• If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

  Thomas de Quincey

  Death, Drinking, Procrastination

  "On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1839)

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• No place indeed should murder sanctuarize; Revenge should have no bounds.

  William Shakespeare

  Revenge, Should Have, Bounds

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 4, sc. 7, l. 127

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• Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Money, Luxury, Profit

  Lewis H. Lapham (1989). “Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations on the Civil Religion”

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• I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.

  Dan Barker

  Love, God, Christian

  Dan Barker (2009). “Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists”, p.89, Ulysses Press

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• If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats.

  Arthur Koestler

  Eye, Men, Animal

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• Murder, considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse.

  Cyprian

  People, Violence, Virtue

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• If a man really believes that God once upheld slavery; that he commanded soldiers to kill women and babes; that he believed in polygamy; that he persecuted for opinion's sake; that he will punish forever, and that he hates an unbeliever, the effect in my judgment will be bad. It always has been bad. This belief built the dungeons of the Inquisition. This belief made the Puritan murder the Quaker.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Hate, Believe, Men

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1909). “Interviews”

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• I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Time, Men, Compassion

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• To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

  Albert Einstein

  War, Mind, Ordinary

  Albert Einstein (2010). “Ideas And Opinions”, p.165, Broadway Books

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• Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

  Charles Robert Maturin

  Cells, Voice, Solitude

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• When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.

  Simone Weil

  Spiritual, Men, Class

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.174, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• In a climate where people don't understand the numbers, newspapers, campaigners, companies, and politicians can get away with murder

  David J. C. MacKay

  Future, Numbers, People

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• If you are not the victim, don't examine it entirely from your point of view because when YOU'RE not the victim, it becomes pretty easy to rationalize and excuse cruelty, injustice, inequality, slavery, and even murder. But when you're the victim, things look a lot differently from that angle.

  Gary Yourofsky

  Views, Looks, Slavery

  Speech to the students of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Summer 2010.

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