Quotes about murder
page 11

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo

“Almost all medieval Muslim historians credit their heroes with desecration of Hindu idols and/or destruction of Hindu temples. The picture that emerges has the following components, depending upon whether the iconoclast was in a hurry on account of Hindu resistance or did his work at leisure after a decisive victory:
1. The idols were mutilated or smashed or burnt or melted down if they were made of precious metals.
2. Sculptures in relief on walls and pillars were disfigured or scraped away or torn down.
3. Idols of stone and inferior metals or their pieces were taken away, sometimes by cartloads, to be thrown down before the main mosque in (a) the metropolis of the ruling Muslim sultan and (b) the holy cities of Islam, particularly Mecca, Medina and Baghdad.
4. There were instances of idols being turned into lavatory seats or handed over to butchers to be used as weights while selling meat.
5. Brahmin priests and other holy men in and around the temple were molested or murdered.
6. Sacred vessels and scriptures used in worship were defiled and scattered or burnt.
7. Temples were damaged or despoiled or demolished or burnt down or converted into mosques with some structural alterations or entire mosques were raised on the same sites mostly with temple materials.
8. Cows were slaughtered on the temple sites so that Hindus could not use them again.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Ned Kelly photo
Alain Daniélou photo
Graham Greene photo
Ken Livingstone photo
H. G. Wells photo

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Edward R. Murrow photo
Elie Wiesel photo
Tom Baker photo
Max Horkheimer photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Oliver P. Morton photo

“After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Leon Trotsky', p. 747
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Hans Frank photo

“Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered.”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

To Leon Goldensohn, July 20, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Assata Shakur photo
Jeane Kirkpatrick photo
Albert Jay Nock photo
George William Curtis photo

“Pooh! Pooh! Nonsense!' was the reply, 'that's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work so. The returning of slaves amounts to nothing in fact. All that is obsolete. And why make all this row? Can't you hush? We've nothing to do with slavery, we tell you. We can't touch it; and if you persist in this agitation about a mere form and theory, why, you're a set of pestilent fanatics and traitors; and if you get your noisy heads broken, you get just what you deserve'. And they quoted in the faces of the abolitionists the words of Governor Edward Everett, who was not an authority with them, in that fatal inaugural address, 'The patriotism of all classes of citizens must be invited to abstain from a discussion which, by exasperating the master, can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave'. It was as if some kindly Pharisee had said to Christ, 'Don't try to cast out that evil spirit; it may rend the body on departing'. Was it not as if some timid citizen had said, 'Don't say hard things of intemperance lest the dram-shops, to spite us, should give away the rum'? And so the battle raged. The abolitionists dashed against slavery with passionate eloquence like a hail of hissing fire. They lashed its supporters with the scorpion whip of their invective. Ambition, reputation, ortune, ease, life itself they threw upon the consuming altar of their cause. Not since those earlier fanatics of freedom, Patrick Henry and James Otis, has the master chord of human nature, the love of liberty, been struck with such resounding power. It seemed in vain, so slowly their numbers increased, so totally were they outlawed from social and political and ecclesiastical recognition. The merchants of Boston mobbed an editor for virtually repeating the Declaration of Independence. The city of New York looked on and smiled while the present United States marshal insulted a woman as noble and womanly and humane as Florence Nightingale. In other free States men were flying for their lives; were mobbed, seized, imprisoned, maimed, murdered; but still as, in the bitter days of Puritan persecution in Scotland, the undaunted voices of the Covenanters were heard singing the solemn songs of God that echoed and re-echoed from peak to peak of the barren mountains, until the great dumb wilderness was vocal with praise — so in little towns and great cities were heard the uncompromising voices of these men sternly intoning the majestic words of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, which echoed from solitary heart to heart until the whole land rang with the litany of liberty.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Tom Robbins photo
Murray Leinster photo

“He’d caused the First Native War on Mars, by taking advantage of the fact that at that time human law had not defined the killing of Martians as murder.”

Murray Leinster (1896–1975) Novelist, short story writer

The Aliens, p. 92 (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1957).
Short fiction, Anthropological Note (1957)

George Bernard Shaw photo

“As [Phoenix] drew near her room, she heard a woman's voice saying, "It will be easier for us when that monster of yours dies."
"There will be another one, and she will be the same," answered Chia Lien's voice.
"You can make Patience your wife," the woman said. "She will be easier to manage."
"She won't even let me touch Patience," Chia Lien said. "And Patience doesn't dare complain, though she doesn't like her vigilance either. I wonder what I have done to deserve such a wife."
Phoenix shook with rage. Thinking that Patience must have complained behind her back, she turned to her and slapped her face. She then burst into the room, seized Pao-er's wife and struck her repeatedly. Fearing that Chia Lien would bolt from the room, she planted herself at the door while she denounced the woman. "Prostitute!" she cried, "you seduce your mistress's husband and then plot to murder her! And you," she turned to Patience, "you prostitutes are all in conspiracy against me, though you pretend to be on my side." She struck Patience again.
Patience was outraged. She cried, "You two—is it not enough for you to do this shameful thing without dragging me in?" She also made for Pao-er's wife.
Chia Lien, who had until now stood helplessly watching Phoenix beat Pao-er's wife, took the opportunity to hide his own embarrassment by beating Patience. "Who are you to raise your hand against her?" he said to the maid.
Patience retreated and said, weeping, "But why did you drag me into it?"
Phoenix's anger mounted when she saw that Patience was afraid of Chia Lien and commanded her to ignore him and beat Pao-er's wife. The maid, outraged and helpless, ran out of the room, crying and threatening to kill herself.
Phoenix now threw herself at Chia Lien, crying that he might as well kill her then and there since he wanted to get rid of her. Chia Lien grew desperate. He seized a sword from the wall and said he would gladly oblige if she insisted.
Yu-shih and others arrived on the scene. "What is the matter now?"”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

she asked. "Everything was going well a moment ago."
Emboldened by the presence of the newcomers, Chia Lien became more menacing. Phoenix, on the other hand, quieted herself and left the scene to seek the protection of the Matriarch. She threw herself sobbing into the Matriarch's arms and said, "Save me, Lao Tai-tai. Lien Er-yeh wants to kill me."
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), pp. 198–199

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Moshe Dayan photo
George Holyoake photo

“Moved by a generous eagerness to turn men's attention to the power which dwelt in circumstances, Mr. Owen devised the instructive phrase, that "man's character was formed for him and not by him." He used the unforgettable inference that "man is the creature of circumstances." The school of material improvers believed they could put in permanent force right circumstances. The great dogma was their charter of encouragement. To those who hated without thought It seemed a restrictive doctrine to be asked to admit that there were extenuating circumstances in the career of every rascal. To the clergy with whom censure was a profession, and who held that all sin was wilful, man being represented as the "creature of circumstances," appeared a denial of moral responsibility. When they were asked to direct hatred against error, and pity the erring — who had inherited so base a fortune of incapacity and condition — they were wroth exceedingly, and said it would be making a compromise with sin. The idea of the philosopher of circumstances was that the very murderer in his last cell had been born with a staple in his soul, to which the villainous conditions of his life had attached an unseen chain, which had drawn him to the gallows, and that the rope which was to hang him was but the visible part. Legislators since that day have come to admit that punishment is justifiable only as far as it has preventive influence. To use the great words of Hobbes, "Punishment regardeth not the past, only the future."”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

William Ewart Gladstone photo

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

1870s

Christopher Hitchens photo

“Not all monotheisms are exactly the same, at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion, they're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of wahhabism and salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally, it's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman – in the Arabian Peninsula – three times through an archangel, and that the resulted material, which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old…and The New Testament, is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right – as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read, had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says "no, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams – this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now – "Behead those who cartoon Islam". Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you why you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left. This is really serious. … Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred, is also the main caller for censorship.”

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM&feature=youtu.be&t=16m36s
"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate", 15/11/2006.
2000s, 2006

Newton Lee photo
Emma Goldman photo
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky photo
Joseph Hayne Rainey photo
Algernon Charles Swinburne photo
Aron Ra photo
Rudolph Rummel photo

“The history of the Democratic Party can be concisely captured by referring to its steadfast allegiance to the four Ss. Slavery, Secession, Segregation, and Socialism. During the Obama presidency we have seen how hard old habits die, even for a black man whose race was the long-time victim of Democratic Party's bone-deep authoritarianism. Under this Democratic president we have seen a war waged on several fronts against America's young. Indeed, the Democrats' historic taste for and belief in slavery have resurfaced with a vengeance and indiscriminately under the Obama administration, whether white, black, yellow, red, male, or female America's young are dying and being forced to work for Obama and his lieutenants as they seek to maintain their party's hold on political power. How so? Well, America has never had a president and administration so eager to kill unborn Americans. Even with post-1973 science having proved irrefutably that the unborn are human beings, and even though American law always has defined them as U. S. citizens, Obama and his colleagues have strengthened at every point they could the absurd notion that unborn humans are the chattel property of the woman who bears them, and so can be disposed of, that is, murdered, at her whim. And, in what must be considered a masterpiece of Orwellian language, Obama and his team, and most Democrats since 1973, describe this federal government-issued license to kill as a woman's 'right', a means by which she manifests her equality with men. They then damn any one who questions the logic, sanity, or justice of this argument as an 'extremist'. Only in an America in which a political entity as devoted to the four 'Ss' as the Democratic Party could opposition to the cold-blooded murder of fellow citizens unable defend themselves be identified by the country’s best-educated as 'extremism'. If this is indeed a right, it is a right gives each woman the right to be a slave-owner and a Nazi. Such a 'right' really is no different than the rights sanctioned by the Dred Scott decision and the Nuremberg laws, each of which legally defined certain categories of people out of the human race in order to enslave or kill them. Since 1973, the application of this 'right' has produced precisely the same results as Dred Scott and the Nuremberg laws, though in numbers so immense, 55 million and climbing, that they make those acts seem rather tame and minimally destructive of humans.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in "Obama and his party offer America's young … death, misery, and slavery" http://non-intervention.com/1143/obama-and-his-party-offer-america%E2%80%99s-young-%E2%80%A6-death-misery-and-slavery/ (21 November 2013), by M. Scheuer, Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention.
2010s

Caitlín R. Kiernan photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
Ray Comfort photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Michael Howard photo

“Let us be clear. Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists, and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.”

Michael Howard (1941) British politician

Colin Brown, "Howard seeks to placate 'angry majority'", The Independent, October 7, 1993
Speech to the Conservative Party conference, October 6, 1993

David Ben-Gurion photo

“Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

As quoted by Ariel Sharon, in the documentary The 50 Years War : Israel & The Arabs (1999), this advice was given to him by Ben-Gurion after the controversial raid on Qibya.

Rudolph Rummel photo
Theresa Sparks photo
Kent Hovind photo
Rudolf Rocker photo
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo
Hans Ruesch photo
Hans Fritzsche photo
Leonard Cohen photo

“I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"The Future"
The Future (1992)

Francis Escudero photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“The more abstract the expert Idiocracy gets in defining what is murder-by-Muslim immigrant, the more removed will be their solutions—removed from solutions that are at once achievable and the legitimate purview of limited government.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Manchester Massacre And The Immigration Vexation," http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/05/manchester_massacre_and_the_immigration_vexation.html American Thinker, May 25, 2017
2010s, 2017

Koenraad Elst photo
Steven Erikson photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Assata Shakur photo
Bernard Cornwell photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation"…In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003…the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once.That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible…Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer…In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally…Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country…And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war.”

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

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html: On Michael Moore
2000s, 2004

Eugene V. Debs photo
Michael A. Stackpole photo
George Galloway photo
Charles Stross photo
Francis Parkman photo
David Lloyd George photo

“We have murder by the throat.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On the Irish Republican Army, in a speech at Guildhall, London (9 November 1920), quoted in The Times (10 November 1920), p. 12
Prime Minister

Anthony Burgess photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“[Julian]
Why did I try a faith I should have known
Spotless as the white dove. I cannot feel
The beating of her heart. I'll kiss the colour
Back to her cheek. Oh, God! her lip is ice —
There is no breath upon it! —
AGNES, thy JULIAN is thy murderer!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(26th October 1822) Dramatic Scene I
(2nd November 1822) Dramatic Scene II see The Vow of the Peacock (1835) Bacchus and Ariadne
16th November 1822) Fragments in Rhyme I: The Soldier's Funeral see The Improvisatrice (1824
16th November 1822) Fragments in Rhyme II: Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love Letter see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Miriam Makeba photo
Herman Cain photo

“Lawrence O'Donnell: Mr. Cain, in fact, you were in college from 1963 to 1967, at the height of the civil rights movement, exactly when the most important demonstrations and protests were going on. You could easily, as a student at Morehouse, between 1963 and 1967, actively participated in the kinds of protests that got African Americans the rights they enjoy today. You watched from that perspective at Morehouse when you were not participating in those processes. You watch black college students from around the country and white college students from around the country come to the South and be murdered fighting for the right of African Americans. Do you regret sitting on those sidelines at that time?
Herman Cain: Lawrence, your attempt to say that I sat on the sidelines is an irrelevant comparison that you are trying to deduce from that—
Lawrence O'Donnell: It's in your book. It's in your book.
Herman Cain: Now, Lawrence, I know what's in my book. Now, let me ask you a question. Did you expect every black student and every black college in America to be out there, in the middle of every fight? The answer is no. So for you to say, why was I sitting on the sidelines, I think that that is an inaccurate deduction that you are trying to make. You didn't know, Lawrence, what I was doing with the rest of my life. You didn't know what my family situation may have been. Maybe, just maybe, I had a sick relative, which is why I might not have been sitting in, or doing the Freedom Rides. So what I'm saying, Lawrence, is, with all due respect my friend, your deduction is incorrect, and it's not logical, okay?”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

referring to "This is Herman Cain!" recounting that Herman read about sit-ins and Freedom Rides, and followed his father's advice to "stay out of trouble".

Howard Bloom photo

“The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural scientist, and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on observed data. The desire to present this kind of façade accounts, one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the reader with the realism of his setting in order that he may “get away with murder” in his plot. The persuasiveness of the scene is thus counted on to spill over into the action of the story. In like manner, when a treatise on social science is filled with this kind of data, the realism of the latter can influence our acceptance of the thesis, which may, on scrutiny, rest on very dubious constructs, such as definitions of units. Along with this there is sometimes a great display of scientific preciseness in formulations. But my reading suggests that some of these writers are often very precise about matters which are not very important and rather imprecise about matters which are. Most likely this is an offsetting process. If there are subjects one cannot afford to be precise about because they are too little understood or because one’s views of them are too contrary to traditional beliefs about society, one may be able to maintain an appearance of scientific correctness by taking great pains in the expressing of matters of little consequence. These will afford scope for a display of scholarly meticulousness and of one’s command of the scientific terminology.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” pp. 148-149.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Rudolph Rummel photo

“Democracies don’t murder their citizens.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence(1997), p. 95

“Killing a park ranger in Alaska ain't the same thing as murder.”

Dana Stabenow (1952) American writer

A Cold Day for Murder

Orson Scott Card photo
Michael Powell photo

“Everyone has heard of Canterbury if only because they murder archbishops there.”

Michael Powell (1905–1990) English film director

Attributed

Isadora Duncan photo
Marlon Brando photo
George W. Bush photo
Miklós Horthy photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Assata Shakur photo
John Adams photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Rex Stout photo
Aron Ra photo

“I would say that, whenever religion has rule over law, that madness will reign, with automatic violations of human rights, but maybe I'm being alarmist. What do they say? How can we know what sort of society they envision?.. We know that they are nearly all republicans, and that that party has been virtually assimilated by them, and we know they will speak more freely when they feel the safety of numbers. So let's look at the Republican Party platform of one of the red states, a very red state… Of course, they want to make pornography illegal (no surprises there), they also want to be able to filibuster the US senate again… Regarding the environment, they strongly support the immediate repeal and abolishment of the Endangered Species Act. Remember that these people don't believe in evolution, so they don't understand the importance of biodiversity and they don't care about the rights of animals either. They want to dominate and subdue the earth, just like their abominable doctrine demands, so they strongly oppose all efforts of environmental groups that stymie business interests, especially those of the oil and gas industry… Texas republicans not only want marriage to be restricted to one man and one woman (despite what the Bible says), but they insist it must be a natural man and a natural woman… So transgender people would be completely ostracized under the law should they get their way. There's no civil union options for gay couples either, because the platform also opposes the creation, recognition or benefits of partnerships outside marriage that are provided by some political subdivisions. As if that weren't enough, they also want to define the word "family" such that it excludes homosexual couples. They say they deplore sensitivity training (think about that for a moment), and they state very clearly that they want homosexuality condemned as unacceptable. They mean that very strongly too, so strongly in fact that they oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality as a reaction of religious faith. In fact, they go so far as to urge the immediate repeal of the hate crimes law specifically where that relates to sexual orientation… If you're uncertain whether that includes acts of violence, there at least two members of the current State Board of Education who implied that it should, and we know of a few Tea Partiers who insist that homosexuals should be executed, murdered by the state. I am alarmed at how popular this abominable sentiment is… Under the heading "supporting motherhood", they strongly support women who "choose" to devote their lives to their families and raising their children, but they implicitly object to women choosing other options such as college, careers, or not having children at all. A woman's ambition beyond the confines of the kitchen and obeisance to her husband is decried by conservatives as a deplorable assault on the family which, of course, they blame on liberals. Regarding the right to life, they say that all innocent human life must be respected and safeguarded from fertilization to natural death. Notice a few subtle caveats here: the qualifier of protecting only innocent life is how Texas republicans justify having executed more prisoners than any other state in the union, nearly five times as many as the next deadliest state in fact. Says something about Christian forgiveness, doesn't it!”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Republican Theocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSjNg7nQvB0 (November 4, 2012)