C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Murder

Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer.

Burton.

I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways.

Shakespeare.

No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize.

Shakespeare.

Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.

Shakespeare.

Murder itself is past all expiation,
The greatest crime that nature doth abhor.

Goffe.

Is there a crime
Beneath the roof of heaven, that stains the soul
Of man, with more infernal hue, than damn’d
Assassination?

Cibber.

Murther, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.

Shakespeare.

Murder may pass unpunish’d for a time,
But tardy justice will o’ertake the crime.

Dryden.

Murder, like talent, seems occasionally to run in families.

George Henry Lewes.

One to destroy is murder by the law,
And gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe;
To murder thousands takes a specious name,
War’s glorious art, and gives immortal fame.

Young.

Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man’s life.

Daniel Webster.

Blood, though it sleep a time, yet never dies.

Chapman.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Maturin.

Other sins only speak, murder shrieks out.
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.

Webster.

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Shakespeare.

Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell!
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, hold, hold!

Shakespeare.

’Twas not enough
By subtle fraud to snatch a single life;
Puny impiety! whole kingdoms fell
To sate the lust of power: more horrid still,
The foulest stain and scandal of our nature,
Became its boast. One murder made a villain;
Millions a hero.

Dr. Porteus.

The scream of rage, the groan, the strife,
The blow, the gasp, the horrid cry,
The panting, throttled prayer for life,
The dying’s heaving sigh,
The murderer’s curse, the dead man’s fix’d, still glare,
And fears, and death’s cold sweat—they all are there!

Dana.

Twice it call’d, so loudly call’d,
With horrid strength, beyond the pitch of nature;
And murder! murder! was the dreadful cry.
A third time it return’d with feeble strength,
But o’ the sudden ceas’d, as though the words
Were smother’d rudely in the grappl’d throat,
And all was still again, save the wild blast
Which at a distance growl’d—
Oh! it will never from my mind depart!
That dreadful cry, all i’ the instant still’d.

Joanna Baillie.

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD