You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?
(Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher, classical scholar, critic of culture. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 10, p. 192, selection 5, number 47, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin, de Gruyter (1980). Unpublished fragments dating to November 1882February 1883.
Originally meant to be attributed to Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.)
The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.
(Don Delillo (b. 1926), U.S. author. Frank Vásquez, in Libra, pt. 2, "6 September," (1988).)
For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.
(Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Canadian communications theorist. Title essay, The Mechanical Bride (1951).)
We are not cave dwellers anymore, we live in the age of technology. When someone needs a car, he does not need to build it. He can buy it. When someone needs a murder, he himself does not need to kill. He can order it.
(Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990), Swiss dramatist, novelist, essayist. Trans. by Gerhard P. Knapp (1995). The Collaborator, pt. I (1976).
On technological progress and free enterprise.)
A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.
Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.
(John Dos Passos (1896-1970), U.S. novelist, poet, playwright, painter. Journeys Between Wars, "Introduction to Civil War 1916-1937," Harcourt Brace and Company (1938).)