A Quote by Bill James

There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.

Bill James

Quote Topics

Believe Confessions False I Believe Many More Than True

Quote Author

Bill James
American - Writer
Born: October 5, 1949

My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, butintellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.

W.N.P. Barbellion

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

Andrew Sullivan

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions.

David K. Shipler

Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth.

Felix Frankfurter

People plead guilty or admit to crimes they didn't commit for various reasons. Certain interrogation procedures produce high rates of false confessions.

Eric Schneiderman

Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion.

Stephen Stigler

There are many more languages than we think: and man betrays himself more often than he desires. How things speak! - but there are very few listeners, so that man can only, as it were, chatter on in the void when he pours out his confessions: he squanders his ‘truths’, as the sun does its light. - Isn’t it rather a pity that the void has no ears?

Pierre Klossowski

Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.

Simone de Beauvoir

'The want of proper examination, true contrition, and a firm purpose of amendment, is the cause of bad confessions, and of the ruin of souls.'

Benedict Joseph Labre

You're not going to get any true confessions out of me," she said. "I'm a Leo, and our thing is changing the subject.

Ira Levin

Evangelical churches are weaker than we realize because we don't teach the confessions and doctrine.

J. I. Packer

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

Joseph Brodsky

A kiss, when all is said, what is it? An oath that's given closer than before; A promise more precise; the sealing of Confessions that till then were barely breathed; A rosy dot placed on the i in loving.

Edmond Rostand

Even if you're an observer of a story that you yourself made up, you're still very much connected to it. You love it and feel it, no less than somebody's who's writing from their direct 'I' or 'me.' I'm just so much more interesting in stories than confessions.