“In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood.”
"A Statement against the War in Vietnam".
The Long-Legged House (1969)
Context: If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer — and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last. In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood.
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Wendell Berry 189
author 1934Related quotes
“GG Allin: I could have possibly been a serial killer or a mass murderer.”
GG Allin on The Jerry Springer Show, May 5. 1993.
On The Jerry Springer Show
Speech in Springfield Illinois (24 October 1952)
Context: I do not believe it is man's destiny to compress this once boundless earth into a small neighborhood, the better to destroy it. Nor do I believe it is in the nature of man to strike eternally at the image of himself, and therefore of God. I profoundly believe that there is on this horizon, as yet only dimly perceived, a new dawn of conscience. In that purer light, people will come to see themselves in each other, which is to say they will make themselves known to one another by their similarities rather than by their differences. Man's knowledge of things will begin to be matched by man's knowledge of self. The significance of a smaller world will be measured not in terms of military advantage, but in terms of advantage for the human community. It will be the triumph of the heartbeat over the drumbeat.
These are my beliefs and I hold them deeply, but they would be without any inner meaning for me unless I felt that they were also the deep beliefs of human beings everywhere. And the proof of this, to my mind, is the very existence of the United Nations.
Source: The Book of Disquiet
—And the Moon Be Still as Bright (1948)
The Martian Chronicles (1950)
“This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.”
Source: The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), Chapter 2 (p. 23)
Hjalmar Schacht to Leon Goldensohn (10 March 1946)
“I couldn't possibly have become a member of this institute if I hadn't founded it myself.”
On the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the difficulties he has had with others involved in medical research because of his unorthodox approaches and attitudes, as quoted in a Brief biography at PBS.org http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bmsalk.html