Quotes about homicide

A collection of quotes on the topic of homicide, use, likeness, time.

Quotes about homicide

George Orwell photo
Socrates photo

“[In the world below…] those who appear to have lived neither well not ill, go to the river Acheron, and mount such conveyances as they can get, and are carried in them to the lake, and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds, and suffer the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, and are absolved, and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts. But those who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes—who have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murders foul and violent, or the like—such are hurled into Tartarus, which is their suitable destiny, and they never come out. Those again who have committed crimes, which, although great, are not unpardonable—who in moment of anger, for example, have done violence to a father or a mother, and have repented for the remainder of their lives, or who have taken the life of another under like extenuating circumstances—these are plunged into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo for a year, but at the end of the year the wave casts them forth—mere homicides by way of Cocytus, patricides and matricides by Pyriphlegethon—and they are borne to the Acherusian Lake, and here they lift up their voices and call upon the victims whom they have slain or wronged, to have pity on them, and to receive them, and to let them come out of the river into the lake. And if they prevail, then they come forth and cease from their troubles; but if not, they are carried back again into Tartarus and from thence into the rivers unceasingly, until they obtain mercy from those whom they have wronged: for this is the sentence inflicted upon them by their judges.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Saint Patrick photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Pope Gregory I photo
Kent Hovind photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo

“Sleepwalking?"
"Nightmare?"
"Homicidal psycho jungle cat!”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection

Agatha Christie photo

“Many homicidal lunatics are very quiet, unassuming people. Delightful fellows.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Source: And Then There Were None: A Mystery Play in Three Acts

“He groaned and I saw his face. "Curran!" I would've preferred a homicidal lunatic. Oh, wait…”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Strikes

Jeannette Walls photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
John Connolly photo
Brandon Sanderson photo

“Let's not get naughty.
How about homicidal instead?”

Lora Leigh (1965) American writer

Source: Wicked Pleasure

Robert Sheckley photo

“She was an extremely attractive woman if you like the type, which could best be described as homicidal schizophrenic paranoiac with kittenish overtones.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Source: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 5 (p. 45)

Warren Farrell photo
H. G. Wells photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
René Girard photo

“An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles.”

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 11-12.

Khushwant Singh photo
T. Berry Brazelton photo
Harry Harrison photo
Sue Grafton photo
Lactantius photo

“For he who reckons it a pleasure that a man, though justly condemned, should be slain in his sight, pollutes his conscience as much as if he should become a spectator and a sharer of a homicide which is secretly committed.”
Nam qui hominem, quamuis ob merita damnatum, in conspectu suo iugulari pro uoluptate computat, conscientiam suam polluit, tam scilicet, quam si homicidii, quod fit occulte, spectator et particeps fiat.

Lactantius (250–325) Early Christian author

Book VI, Chap. XX
The Divine Institutes (c. 303–13)

Lord Randolph Churchill photo

“Your iron industry is dead; dead as mutton. Your coal industries, which depend greatly upon the iron industries, are languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the foreigner. Your woollen industry is in articulo mortis, gasping, struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, is come to a standstill. Turn your eyes where you like, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease. The self-satisfied Radical philosophers will tell you it is nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is no longer profitable; it is working and struggling. So do the muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly comes the rigot mortis…But what has produced this state of things? Free imports? I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I should recommend a coroner's inquest and a trial by jury…”

Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895) British politician

Speech in Blackpool (24 January 1884), quoted in Robert Rhodes James, Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Phoenix, 1994), p. 137

Herman Kahn photo
Warren Farrell photo

“Blacks are six times more likely than whites to be victims of homicides.”

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 214.

Herman Kahn photo

“The renaissance of New York City has been built on a foundation of crime reduction, and for the last four years, Howard Safir has worked tirelessly to increase safety and the quality of life for all New Yorkers. The extent to which he's succeeded—on his watch, crime is down by 38%, and homicide by 44%—is not only remarkable, it's a testament to his skill and dedication. During Howard's tenure, the Department reduced crime by more than it has under any other Police Commissioner. Howard has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in law enforcement. I wish him the best as he begins this new chapter in his life.”

Howard Safir (1941)

Rudolph Giuliani, then-Mayor of New York City, announcing the resignation of Howard Safir as New York City Police Commissioner.
[Archives of the Mayor's Press Office, http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2000b/pr307-00.html, Release #307-00 - MAYOR GIULIANI AND POLICE COMMISSIONER SAFIR ANNOUNCE THAT SAFIR IS LEAVING THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT, The City of New York, 2000-08-09, 2007-12-20]
About

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson photo
James Frazer photo
Andrew Vachss photo
Immortal Technique photo

“Homicide Harlem blam! what's tha problem?”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

Harlem Streets
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

James Comey photo
Camille Paglia photo

“When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

on date rape, p. 33
Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality"

Frank Chodorov photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“Our common speech contains numberless verbs with which to describe the infliction of violence or cruelty or brutality on others. It only really contains one common verb that describes the effect of violence or cruelty or brutality on those who, rather than suffering from it, inflict it. That verb is the verb to brutalize. A slaveholder visits servitude on his slaves, lashes them, degrades them, exploits them, and maltreats them. In the process, he himself becomes brutalized. This is a simple distinction to understand and an easy one to observe. In the recent past, idle usage has threatened to erode it. Last week was an especially bad one for those who think the difference worth preserving…Col. Muammar Qaddafi's conduct [killing his protesters] is far worse than merely brutal—it is homicidal and sadistic…and even if a headline can't convey all that, it can at least try to capture some of it. Observe, then, what happens when the term is misapplied. The error first robs the language of a useful expression and then ends up by gravely understating the revolting reality it seeks to describe…Far from being brutalized by four decades of domination by a theatrical madman, the Libyan people appear fairly determined not to sink to his level and to be done with him and his horrible kin. They also seem, at the time of writing, to want this achievement to represent their own unaided effort. Admirable as this is, it doesn't excuse us from responsibility. The wealth that Qaddafi is squandering is the by-product of decades of collusion with foreign contractors. The weapons that he is employing against civilians were not made in Libya; they were sold to him by sophisticated nations.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

Tanith Lee photo

“Crank is to coffee what sexual homicide is to a goodnight kiss.”

Jim Goad (1961) Author, publisher

The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats (Simon & Schuster, 1997)

Daniel Dennett photo

“[I]n all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city.”

citing the research of George Williams from "Huxley's Evolution and Ethics in Sociobiological Perspective" in Zygon (v.23/88)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Michael Chabon photo

“The rest of Sitka’s homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 1

Jordan Peterson photo

“You plunge into that underworld space, and that's also where you begin to nurse feelings of resentment and aggrievement and murder and homicide, and even worse. If people are betrayed enough, they become obsessed with the futility of being itself, and they go to places where perhaps no one would ever want to go if they were in their right mind. And they begin to nurse fantasies of the ultimate revenge, and that's a horrible place to be. And that's hell. That's why hell has always been a suburb of the underworld, because if you get plunged into a situation that you don't understand, and things are not good for you anymore, it's only one step from being completely confused, to being completely outraged and resentful, and then it's only one step from there to really looking for revenge. And that can take you places – well, that merely to imagine properly can be traumatic. And I've seen that with people many times. And I think that anybody who uses their imagination on themselves can see how that happens, because I can't imagine that there isn't a single person in the room who hasn't nursed fairly intense fantasies of revenge, at least at one point in their life – and usually for what appear to be good reasons. It can shake your faith in being to be betrayed, but if it shakes it so badly that you turn against being itself, that's certainly no solution. All it does is make everything that's bad, even worse.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Angela of Foligno photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax photo

“MISPENDING a Man's time is a kind of self-homicide, it is making Life to be of no use.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections

Olavo de Carvalho photo
Henry VII of England photo
Ann Coulter photo

“We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2001
Context: Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

Maximilien Robespierre photo
Charles Stross photo
Kevin D. Williamson photo

“Nobody but nobody is quite so dumb as to believe that all, most, or even very many uses of firearms to prevent acts of criminal violence result in justifiable homicides.”

Kevin D. Williamson (1972) American writer

Most of them do not result in anybody’s being shot, much less shot dead, because most of them do not involve discharging a firearm. As it turns out, pointing a gun at a would-be assailant is in many cases a very persuasive gesture.
"The Dumbest Gun-Control Paragraph" https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dumbest-gun-control-paragraph/ (3 June 2019), National Review

Robert Anton Wilson photo
Dylan Moran photo
Shelley Lubben photo

“I would like to dedicate this book to the hundreds of women and men who died in the porn industry from AIDS, suicide, homicide and drug related deaths. Your voices will be heard now.”

Shelley Lubben (1968–2019) author, singer, motivational speaker, and former pornographic actress

Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn: The Greatest Illusion on Earth (2010), Dedication

Kendrick Lamar photo
Steven Pinker photo
Sidney Poitier photo

“Compassion for other human beings has to extend to the society that’s been grinding the powerless under its heel. The more civilized the society becomes, the more humane it becomes; the more it can see its own humanity, the more it sees the ways in which its humanity has been behaving inhumanly. This injustice of the world inspires a rage so intense that to express it fully would require homicidal action; it’s self-destructive, destroy-the-world rage. Simply put, I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.”

Sidney Poitier (1927) American-born Bahamian actor, film director, author, and diplomat

Variant: I’ve learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger; it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage — self-destructive, destroy-the-world rage — and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.
Source: The Measure of a Man (2000)