“Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

— Jean Rostand

The quote "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill…" is famous quote attributed to Jean Rostand (1894–1977), French writer.

See also "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." (misattributed to Joseph Stalin)

Original

On tue un homme, on est un assassin. On tue des millions d'hommes, on est un conquérant. On les tue tous, on est un dieu.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update April 18, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Jean Rostand 3

French writer 1894–1977

Frank E. Peretti book House

Source: House

“There is a difference. If you kill to take money or rob, it is plain murder, but if you kill because of political reasons, that is a political murder.”

Rudolf Höss (1901–1947) German war criminal, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp

To Leon Goldensohn, April 8, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

“Kill me, or you are a murderer.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“Shame on you, cowards to come here, five thousand of you, to slaughter a half-dozen white men. And you come here for what reason? You have been killing their cattle right along, day after day, and not one of them has said anything to you about the loss - and then when you shoot one of your own people, you come here to kill a white man for it ... You are not brave to come here to kill a half-dozen white men!”

Eagle Woman (1820–1888) American peace activist (born 1820, near Big Bend of the Missouri River [in what is now South Dakota], U.S.…

Speech to the same crowd of 5,000, as recounted by a different source, quoted in [Gray, John S., 1986, The Story of Mrs. Picotte-Galpin, a Sioux Heroine: Eagle Woman Becomes a Trader and Counsels for Peace, 1868-1888, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4518988, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 36, 3, 2–21, 0026-9891]

“We don't owe the white man nothing in South Africa. He's killed millions of our women, our children, our babies, our elders.… If he won't get out of town by sundown, we kill everything white that ain't right that's in sight in South Africa. We kill the women, we kill the children, we kill the babies. We kill the blind, we kill the crippled, we kill them all … and kill them a-god-damn-gain because they didn't die hard enough.”

Khalid Abdul Muhammad (1948–2001) American activist

Kean College speech

“And now," Herod calmly said, "You can kill all the new-born…. Kill them all…. take your men and let your men take their swords. Make sure they're sharp. To Bethlehem. Hack. Lunge. Chop. Kill.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Man of Nazareth (1979)

“I killed nobody that didn't deserve killing. In all of these here killings there was no alternative. You couldn't call them cold-blooded killings…. It was either my life or theirs.”

Mickey Cohen

To Mike Wallace in an ABC-TV-interview in Los Angeles (May 18, 1957). Quoted in LA Times http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2007/05/cohen_talks.html (May 19, 1957).