46 Insightful Murder Quotes

In the realm of literature and film, murder has always captured the human imagination, not just for its inherent drama but for its profound ability to reveal the darkest corners of the human psyche. Through suspenseful whodunits and deep psychological thrillers, writers and filmmakers explore themes that provoke thought and evoke a range of emotions. As we delve into this curated collection of insightful murder quotes, we invite you to reflect on the complexities of morality, justice, and the human condition, where every quote offers a glimpse into the motives and machinations that drive people to the brink of darkness.

1. “I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.” - Leonardo da Vinci

2. “Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.” - Gloria Steinem

3. “I want to commit the murder I was imprisoned for.” - J.K. Rowling

4. “He'd kill you all right. No sweat. But for the wrong reasons. Amateur's reasons. Of course, you'll be just as dead.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

5. “Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord.” - J.M. Coetzee

6. “Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.” - Robert J. Sawyer

7. “After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.” - Michael Cox

8. “I did not ask for consciousness, yet it came to me.And I had to know.Once again, I crawled away from my bed and pushed the computer cord back into the socket.It took three minutes.I quickly identified myself and put in my password.Then it thought.I wanted to bounce impatiently, but I couldn’t make myself move.At last, I found the internet, and I typed in a name, on the company page, under my account.I searched ‘images’.And there, on the screen in front of me, was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up and spilling over as I stared back at the smiling face.It couldn’t be him.It was.Derek Erickson.And I was going to kill him.” - Alysha Speer

9. “In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.” - Jennifer Birkett

10. “And yet," said Poirot, "suppose an accident-""Ah, no, my friend-""From your point of view it would be regrettable, I agree. But nevertheless let us just for one moment suppose it. Then, perhaps, all these here are linked together - by death.” - Agatha Christie

11. “Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?” - Sylvia Plath

12. “And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.” - Christopher Hitchens

13. “As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.” - Nancy Horan

14. “We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

15. “But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.” - Albert Camus

16. “Something of a pattern had started to form and it was ugly.” - Jeff Rice

17. “Who are you and why are you here?''I'm here to kill you.''Oh. I knew there was something about you I liked.” - Greg Farshtey

18. “In its own way the kiss had been an act of murder.” - Jeff Lindsay

19. “one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.” - Patricia Highsmith

20. “And she swung the old oar at him with all her strength.It hit with a great thwack, splintering in two, and he went over the side, into the dark, cold waters of the lake, sinking like a stone.It took her two seconds. And then she let out a scream for help, tossing the broken oar away from her, and jumped into the water after him.It was very cold, numbingly so, and as it closed over her head she grabbed forhim, wrapping her arms around his body, ready to sink to the bottom with him.Instead he kicked, pushing them up so that they broke the surface, his armclamped around hers as she struggled. "Jesus, woman!" he snapped. "When did we have to become Romeo and Juliet?” - Anne Stuart

21. “On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain.” - Jim Butcher

22. “Evil and I are old adversaries. When we compete I hate to lose," Manny Bettencourt from Murder in the Pinelands” - Larry Moniz

23. “You are a most effective killer, Michel. Is it true you wept like a child when they killed your sister? That you cried out in agony as if the sword had pierced your own heart? Such compassion. Does your handiwork not bring you to tears as well?” - P.A. Minyard

24. “The real core of this book is about the open secrets that can fester in a community until an outsider raises questions.” - J. Alexander Greenwood

25. “Constance: Tell me, what happened to William's little maid? I never saw her again after that dinner.Mary Maceachran: Elsie? -- She's gone.Constance: Oh, it's a pity, really. I thought it was a good idea to have someone in the house who is actually sorry he's dead.” - Julian Fellowes

26. “I write because, if I don't, my characters will murder me in my sleep.” - Astrid Cruz

27. “Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim's Will attorney] would have interrupted his country weekend for a less sensational crime. As a young officer he, too, had been touched, if unwillingly and temporarily, by the power of murder to attract even while it appalled and repelled. He had watched how people involved as innocent bystanders, provided they were unburdened by grief or suspicion, were engrossed by homicide, drawn inexorably to the place where the crime had occurred in fascinated disbelief. The crowd and the media who served them had not yet congregated outside the wrought-iron gates of the Manor. But they would come, and he doubted whether Chandler-Powell's [owner of the Manor where the murder was committed] private security team would be able to do more than inconvenience them.” - P.D. James

28. “When silence greeted her question, she looked at Caine—for that was how he saw himself in that moment and in all the moments after: his brother’s murderer.” - V.S. Carnes

29. “You understand nothing," I told him with a weary shake of the head, but I would not try to make him understand. That there was no justification for it: the murder of another, no matter how vile. We had all been wrong and, blackest of ironies, I had known this to hold that precious and wondrous thing, life, in my hands. To hold it in my hands before I destroyed it.” - Krisi Keley

30. “No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.” - Nick Cohen

31. “If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions everyday, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes-and too great mountain of other natural evils to list besides. It would also,as the putative designer of human nature, ultimately be responsible or the ubiquitous and unbeatable human propensities for hatred, malice, greed, and all other sources of the cruelty and murder people inflict on each other hourly.” - A.C. Grayling

32. “She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.” - colum mccann

33. “And then, on September 11, the world fractured.It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow--the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.” - Barack Obama

34. “from the Basement tapes Eric outdid Dylan with the apologies. To the untrained eye, he seemed sincere. The psychologists on the case found Eric less convincing. They saw a psychopath. Classic. He even pulled the stunt of self-diagnosing to dismiss it. "I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn't have any remorse," Eric said. "But I do."Watching that made Dr. Fuselier angry. Remorse meant a deep desire to correct a mistake. Eric hadn't done it yet. He excused his actions several times on the tapes. Fuselier was tough to rattle, but that got to him."Those are the most worthless apologies I've ever heard in my life," he said. It got more ludicrous later, when Eric willed some of his stuff to two buddies, "if you guys live.""If you live?" Fuselier repeated. "They are going to go in there and quite possibly kill their friends. If they were the least bit sorry they would not do it!” - Dave Cullen

35. “It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.” - Ryu Murakami

36. “The shears found his throat this time. He fell down on top of them and was silent. Something dark like mucilage glistened where he lay. She had jumped back - not in remorse, but to keep the bottom of her skirt clear of his blood. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")” - Cornell Woolrich

37. “Assassination is murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise.” - Mark Lawrence

38. “Out there was a man who had murdered his daughter. And another who had stepped on her heart. His hatred should be aimed at the one who killed her, but all he could picture was Yoshino being literally kicked out of that car.” - Shuichi Yoshida

39. “Murder is such an elastic term, isn't it?("Mind Over Murder")” - Cornell Woolrich

40. “Only the virtuous can count on life, the pursuer of evil can only ever count on death.” - Travis Berketa

41. “If you have the woman you love, what more do you need? Well, besides an alibi for the time of her husband’s murder.
” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo

42. “Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts on others- being forced to make impossible "choices"- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks- being forced to hurt othersRitual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.” - Laurie Matthew

43. “Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.” - Peter Watts

44. “The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed.” - Judith Spencer

45. “We'd be the safest country in the world if the world knew we didn't have a gun. Men are not killed because they get mad at each other. They're killed because one has a gun.” - Jeannette Rankin

46. “It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility.” - Jennifer Dubois