Assassination Quotes

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.

We pledge to fight the dark forces high in the counsels of the Republican Party which have made political capital out of the techniques of character assassination by innuendo.

With the Lincoln assassination, the South didnt feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants.

[On President Kennedy's assassination Nov. 22, 1963:] Something dreadful is going to happen to the president today.

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

People tell me, 'Bill, let it go. The Kennedy assassination was years ago. It was just the assassination of a President and the hijacking of our government by a totalitarian regime - who cares? Just let it go.' I say, 'All right then. That whole Jesus thing? Let it go! It was 2,000 years ago! Who cares?'

You never know what's hit you. A gunshot is the perfect way.

Assassination makes only martyrs, not converts.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.

A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.

At the first meeting of the newly constituted Warren Commission, [former CIA Director] Allen Dulles handed out copies of a book to help define the ideological parameters he proposed for the Commission's forthcoming work. American assassinations were different from European ones, he told the Commission. European assassinations were the work of conspiracies, whereas American assassins acted alone.

Lincoln, answering friends who advised him to seek protection against assassination: "If they kill me the next man will be just as bad for them. In a country like this, where our habits are simple, and must be, assassination is always possible, and will come if they are determined upon it.

The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.

Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death, and religiosu wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man?

Five hours after presenting a ...lecture on cancer before an audience of about 400 in L.A., the windshield was shot out of my car on the road back to San Francisco. The next night the glass window in the tailgate (the back window) was shot out (300 miles removed from the first shooting)...The late Arthur T. Harris, MD, was threatened by two men with assassination if he continued to use Laetrile.

I would no more teach children military training than teach them arson, robbery, or assassination.

Consider well this fact: As long as the German people does not arise and use force directed by its own will, the assassination of the people will continue.

April frowned, irritation evident. “I did not consent to your presence,” she said peevishly. “Please depart, and attempt your political assassination on someone else’s property.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That (a) the President of the United States is authorized to present, on behalf of the Congress, a gold medal of appropriate design to the family of the late Honorable Leo J. Ryan in recognition of his distinguished service as a Member of Congress and the fact of his untimely death by assassination while performing his responsibilities as a Member of the United States House of Representatives.

The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.

The performance group The Ant Farm redoing JFK's assassination in Dallas was an event that struck a chord with me, especially when one of the members said they'd only intended to do it once, but the Dallas audience insisted they repeat the performance.

I have been almost overwhelmed by the announcement of the sad event [Lincoln's assassination] which has so recently occurred. I feel incompetent to perform duties so important and responsible as those which have been so unexpectedly thrown upon me.

I had the luxury of working on the script with Andrew [Dominik] for a good year before the film started, so I was already intimate with the story [of The Assassination of Jesse James] and felt quite prepared walking into it.

The student of Liberty must constantly endeavor to disassociate his imagination from sanguinary dramas of assassination and revolt.

The campaign of character assassination waged [against President Clinton] by the right was a singular, unprecedented effort. Nothing like it exists on the left. What I object to on the right is the obsessive hatred, the bigotry, and the personal savaging of their opponents, all achieved through an echo chamber of talk radio, the Internet and Rupert Murdoch's media outlets. That kind of well-funded disinformation campaign has no analog on the left.

I was born in '58, so the riot in Detroit in 1967 was a memorable introduction to the issue of race and how race made a difference in American society. And then the next year, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. And the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series. All of that made a huge impression on my growing mind.

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, blood, even assassination should so condense - perhaps only really lastingly condense - a Nationality.

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.

Any assassination is an assassination. It's cold, it's terrible. I'm against any capital punishment. Only the Lord has the right to take away life because he's the giver of life. And assassination stands against democracy, against civilization, against a civilized life of people. Alas, the situation in Lebanon is very chaotic and many innocent people lost their lives because they have a state within a state, an army within an army and the respect for life is not high enough.

We remember the specter of sectarian violence -- al Qaeda's attacks on mosques and pilgrims, militias that carried out campaigns of intimidation and campaigns of assassination. And in the face of ancient divisions, you stood firm to help those Iraqis who put their faith in the future.

Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director, I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm — hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

Medicare, getting through that in the '60s, after Kennedy's assassination, where there was such an emotional desire to do something to carry on his agenda.

In 1975 a Senate committee headed by Frank Church found that the [Central Intelligence] Agency had planned a number of assassination operations, using everything from poison to machine guns and sometimes mob hit men

It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

There is the case of Henry Kissinger who was a known scholar who later became the National Security Advisor to President Nixon and later on Secretary of State. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in establishing relations between the U.S. and China. At the same time that he was doing that he was also encouraging all sorts of covert actions against Cuba including political assassinations. This contradiction is one that is hard to understand.

All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shootings of hostages, etc.

A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.

Werewolf is a simple game for a large group of people (seven or more.) It requires no equipment besides some bits of paper; you can play it just sitting in a circle. I’d call it a party game, except that it’s a game of accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, assassination, and mob hysteria.

I love talking about the Kennedy assassination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it.

Tyranny is usually tempered with assassination, and Democracy must be tempered with culture. In the absence of this, it turns into a representation of collective folly.

State violence, particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted assassinations are now justified as part of a state of exception in which a political culture of hyper-punitiveness has become normalized. Revealing itself in a blatant display of unbridled arrogance and power, it is unchecked by any sense of either conscience or morality.