Murder Quotes - Page 36

• People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Witty, People, Age

  "The Gay Science". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sec. 23, 1882.

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• I don't encourage any act of murder nor do I glorify in anybody's death, but I do think that when the white public uses its press to magnify the fact that there are the lives of white hostages at stake, they don't say "hostages," every paper says "white hostages." They give me the impression that they attach more importance to a white hostage and a white death, than they do the death of a human being, despite the color of his skin.

  Malcolm X

  Thinking, White, Color

  Malcolm X's speech at the Oxford Union debate (December 3, 1964) as quoted in Saladin Ambar "Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era" (p. 174), 2013.

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• I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Believe, Punishment, People

  "It just occurred to me that this is the day I was not meant to see". TV Interview with Gill Nevill on Brighton Bomb for Channel 4 "A plus 4", www.margaretthatcher.org. October 15, 1984.

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• Ye who made war that your ships Should lay to at the beck of no nation, Make war now on Murder, that slips The leash of her hounds of damnation; Ye who remembered the Alamo, Remember the Maine!

  Richard Hovey

  War, Maine, Ships

  Richard Hovey (1908). “Along the Trail”

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• I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

  Charles Darwin

  Opinion, Origin Of Species, Struggle For Existence

  Charles Darwin, James T. Costa (2009). “The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species”, p.6, Harvard University Press

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• Just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation.

  Hannah Arendt

  Country, Men, Law

  "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt, (Ch. VIII), 1963.

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• Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Height, Too Much

  "The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature" by Lewis Lapham, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2012.

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• A lot of street crime is horrible, but in terms of the dislocation, the undermining of the family - the corporate criminals, many of whom reside in Congress and the White House - are getting away literally with murder.

  Jerry Brown

  White, House, Criminals

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• The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.

  Jerry Brown

  Thinking, Punishment, People

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• The papers are full of murders -- strange murders. It is all nonsense that there are as many brains as there are men; mankind has only one intellect, and it is beginning to get muddled.

  Leonid Andreyev

  Men, Brain, Paper

  Leonid Andreyev (2007). “The Seven That Were Hanged”, p.150, Wildside Press LLC

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• The fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one's defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.

  Marcel Proust

  Communication, Animal, Inspire

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.257, Modern Library

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• [A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.

  George Orwell

  Would Be, Use, World

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945”

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• People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told it all doesn't matter, they can't stand formlessness.

  Doris Lessing

  Art, Sex, Love Is

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The most stormy ebullitions of passion, from blasphemy to murder, are less terrific than one single act of cool villainy.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Passion, Blasphemy, Stormy

  "Aphorisms on man. Translated from the original manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, citizen of Zuric. ; [One line from Juvenal]" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1790.

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• I did some reading to prep for Expelled. I read one book cover to cover, From Darwin to Hitler , and that was a very interesting book - one of these rare books I wish had been even longer. It's about how Darwin 's theory - supposedly concocted by this mild-mannered saintly man, with a flowing white beard like Santa Claus - led to the murder of millions of innocent people.

  Ben Stein

  Reading, Book, Men

  "Ben Stein is Expelled!". Christianity Today Movies, April 15, 2008.

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• I'm a very firm believer that a liar is a cheat and a thief and a crook. I don't like liars. I never lie. I always told my own child, "If you murder somebody, tell me. I'll help you hide the body. But don't you lie to me.

  Leona Helmsley

  Children, Liars, Lying

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• My enduring feeling about René Lévesque is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope round my neck, he would have complained about how humiliating it was for him to spring the trapdoor. And then, once I was swinging in the wind, he would blame my ghost for having obliged him to murder, thereby imposing a guilt trip on a sweet, self-effacing, downtrodden Francophone.

  Mordecai Richler

  Sweet, Spring, Self

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• Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide.

  Howard Zinn

  War, Responsibility, Psychics

  Howard Zinn (2011). “The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy”, p.248, Seven Stories Press

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• A man convicted of murder is twenty times more likely than a woman convicted of murder to receive the death penalty. Since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty, 120 men and only 1 woman have actually been executed. The woman, from North Carolina, said she preferred to be executed. In North Carolina, a man who commits second-degree murder receives a sentence on average of 12.6 years longer than a woman who commits second-degree murder.

  Warren Farrell

  Men, Average, Years

  "The Myth of Male Power". Book by Warren Farrell, 1993.

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• We can decrease abuse and murder when we get that for both sexes, abuse does not derive from power, but powerlessness.

  Warren Farrell

  Sex, Abuse, Doe

  "The Myth of Male Power". Book by Warren Farrell, 1993.

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• I was in the war. I know how to kill. I was over there. I know how to do it. I've done it before. It's no big deal. You just make an adjustment. You convince yourself it's all right. That's all. It's easy. You just slaughter them.

  Sam Shepard

  War, Done, Easy

  Sam Shepard (1976). “Curse of the Starving Class: A Play in Three Acts”, p.38, Dramatists Play Service Inc

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• Some wonder why I have such a feeling of concern over the imposition of the death penalty. I ask those who wonder how would you feel if you defended a man charged with murder, who was as innocent as any hon. member in this House at this very moment, who was convicted; whose appeal was dismissed, who was executed; and six months later the star witness for the Crown admitted that he, himself, had committed the murder and blamed it on the accused? That experience will never be effaced from my memory.

  John Diefenbaker

  Stars, Memories, Men

  John Diefenbaker's speech in the House of Commons, May 1, 1972.

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• I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Book, Writing, Dark

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Now that I'm out and I'm shouting in doorways Freed from a love more like murder I should be singing but in liberation Feel like a ship with no rudder.

  Andy Partridge

  Singing, Doorways, Ships

  Song: Me And The Wind

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• We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

  Philip Zimbardo

  Thinking, Evil, People

  "The Banality of Heroism" by Zeno Franco, Philip Zimbardo, greatergood.berkeley.edu. September 1, 2006.

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