“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. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.”

—  Thomas De Quincey

"A Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1839). Source: Thomas de Quincy. On Murder (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 84

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Thomas De Quincey13
English author 1785–1859

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