Murder

Its 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. – W. H. Auden

Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death. – Sir Thomas Browne

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

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. – Raymond Chandler

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

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. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love the old way best, the simple way of poison, where we too are strong as men. – Euripides

We kill everybody, my dear. Some with bullets, some with words, and everybody with our deeds. We drive people into their graves, and neither see it nor feel it. – Maxim Gorky

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. – Graham Greene

Every murder turns on a bright hot light, and a lot of people have to walk out of the shadows. – Mark Hellinger

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. – Aldous Huxley

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. – Samuel Johnson

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

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. – G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg

To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in. – Henry Miller

Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder. – Octave Mirbeau

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. – Vladimir Nabokov

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

Murderers are not monsters, theyre men. And thats the most frightening thing about them. – Alice Sebold

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? – William Shakespeare