A Quote by Philip Gourevitch

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.

Philip Gourevitch

Quote Topics

Acts Claim Crime Distinguishes Even Extinct Genocide Idea Intent Make Many Murder People Political Victims Wanting

Quote Author

Philip Gourevitch
American - Author
Born: January 1, 1961

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.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

To murder character is as truly a crime as to murder the body: the tongue of the slanderer is brother to the dagger of the assassin

Tryon Edwards

People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

Denise Mina

With Islamophobic tendencies in Europe and North America it is quite possible that Islamic leaders could be charged with 'political genocide'. An extremist American pastor in a small Florida church held a trial that convicted the Koran of encouraging the murder of non-Muslims and of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It is this sort of outlook that would be encouraged to claim that Islam embodied 'political genocide', a development that would have many negative effects on inter-civilisational relations within and among countries.

Richard A. Falk

We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime is crime, it is not political

Margaret Thatcher

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?

Marquis de Sade

A man lusts to become a god... and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?

David Zindell

Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn’t murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate. It is always a descending spiral leading nowhere. This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multiplies evil and violence in the universe. It doesn’t solve any problems.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Alcee Hastings

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.

Leslie Ford

I'm the one who often makes the 'Murder, She Wrote' reference, and ABC hates that, they don't want me to do that. And I say that having never actually watched 'Murder, She Wrote'. I think people have been trying to compare it to crime shows that are on right now, and all I can do is listen. I don't watch a lot of TV.

Nathan Fillion

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

P. D. James

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.

R. Scott Bakker

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.