Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
View quote | Auden, W. H. quotes
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It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
View quote | Auden, W. H. quotes
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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.
View quote | Camus, Albert quotes
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The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.
View quote | Chandler, Raymond quotes
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Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen.
View quote | Doctorow, E. L. quotes
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Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes
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I love the old way best, the simple way of poison, where we too are strong as men.
View quote | Euripides quotes
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A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
View quote | Greene, Graham quotes
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Every murder turns on a bright hot light, and a lot of people have to walk out of the shadows.
View quote | Hellinger, Mark quotes
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It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
View quote | Huxley, Aldous quotes
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Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast.
View quote | Johnson, Samuel quotes
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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.
View quote | Lapham, Lewis H. quotes
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It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
View quote | Lichtenberg, Georg C. quotes
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Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.
View quote | Mirbeau, Octave quotes
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You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
View quote | Nabokov, Vladimir quotes
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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.
View quote | Quincey, Thomas De quotes
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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?
View quote | Sade, Marquis De quotes
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Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
View quote | Shakespeare, William quotes
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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.
View quote | Weil, Simone quotes
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Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
View quote | Wilde, Oscar quotes
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