A Quote by P. D. James
Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
Related Quotes
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.
Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?
What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime.
I should willingly give every drop of my blood to please Him and to prevent sinners offending Him. I shall be satisfied only when I am a victim to make reparation for my innumerable sins and for the sins of all the world.
When a crime is committed, only the victim and the victim's close circle experience the event as pain, terror, death. To people hearing or reading about it, crime is a metaphor, a symbol of the ancient battles fought every day: evil versus good, chaos versus order.
Rape is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused.
When you're smart on crime, you start off by recognizing that both the victim, first of all, the victim, but also the person who did the crime are both human.
If you are not the victim, don't examine it entirely from your point of view because when YOU'RE not the victim, it becomes pretty easy to rationalize and excuse cruelty, injustice, inequality, slavery, and even murder. But when you're the victim, things look a lot differently from that angle.
A [reformed] vampire ... mostly tries to make reparation for his previous evil by doing good deeds-most commonly, apparently, going into the crime solving business.
I always say, "Never give your lead character an infant. Make them a recovering alcoholic, or the victim of a horrible violent crime because you can really never truly recover from that." It's a story pitfall.
If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim.
Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn't create the crime.
There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone.
To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.
Do you have to do murder?
Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects--a woman's chastity, and murder. Nobody's interested in chastity any more. Murder's all we got to write stories about.
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