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

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

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

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