Assassination

“ Murderers all! Assassination has always been deified; and before it is objected to, the world must change its creeds, its celebrities, and its chronicles. 'Monsieur, you are an assassin,' says an impolite world. ”

“ I would fain have homicide no longer reckoned as hitherto it has been, a title to Heroism, and the infamous but fashionable traffick of human blood, no matter for or against, who, if they pay but well, called by its true name assassination. Your Lordship has still a great field left open to you for another and yet another volume, which nobody can range in so usefully to mankind as yourself. ”

“ Is this our Christian love, to spend a hundred and twenty millions for the assassination of our beloved brethren—avowedly for that purpose? It is needless to object to the word assassination,—wholesale murder by armies is substantially the same thing as separate murders by each individual of the army. ”

“ What strikes the stranger most, and what to-day is making the whole city talk, but only talk, is the common occurrence of assassination. To-day the victim has been an excellent artist—Schwendemann, a Swiss, a medallionist. ”

“ That assassination which they preach to us as so terrible a misdeed we see nevertheless employed by them without either scruple or passion. Let us profit by the example. A violent death seemed to us a terrible thing in the descriptions of it that were made to us, but we see it is a matter of a moment. ”

“ From what I can learn respecting the death of the brother of my poor friend, I am almost led to believe that this unfortunate man, instead of committing suicide, has been the victim of an assassination. ”

“ To give only one instance: A man commits a murder, the fact is confirmed—known by all; the assassination has been performed in bright day, in the open street, and in the presence of a hundred persons. ”

“ The Huey Long Murder Case
[1]
1 —— Prelude to an Inquest
“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”
——DISRAELI
The motives which prompt a killer to do away with a public figure are frequently anything but clear. On the other hand, the identity of such an assassin rarely is in doubt. The assassin himself sees to that, in obvious eagerness to attain recognition as the central figure of a world-shaking event. ”

“ These appearances, I grant, might justify the suspicion, horrible as it is, in one who had known more of me than yourself but was assassination even a virtue, worlds would not tempt me to assassinate that man—wretch though he be—or even to slay him in fair and open combat. ”

“ But, alas! what are all good and great qualities; what are human hopes and human happiness to the revengeful hand of an assassin? What are sweet dreams of peace; what are visions of the future? A simple leaden bullet and a few grains of powder are sufficient in the shortest limit of time to blast and ruin all that is precious in human existence, not alone of the murdered, but of the murderer. I write this in the deep gloom flung over my spirit by the cruel, wanton, and cold-blooded attempted assassination of Abraham Garfield, as well as that of Abraham Lincoln. ”

“ We have to teach them that assassination, the attack of a defenceless village by night, and killing people in their beds, are not acts of war, but are esteemed by civilised nations to be acts of murder. ”

“ So we all live by grace of killing, as indubitably as did any mediæval bravo or headsman. Wheresoever, in the familiar Scriptural phrase, two or three are gathered together, there again is the customary alliance of the Bible and Shakespeare justified by the aptness of the naïve old stage direction, Enter three murderers.... Nor is it instantly apparent that an assassination is converted into righteousness by a subsequent eating of the corpse. ”

“ Even here, however, although nothing can or ought to be said to palliate the cowardly and unmanly crime of assassination, yet something can certainly be advanced to account for the state of feeling by which, from time to time, and by frequent occurrence, it came to be so habitual among the people, that by familiarity it became stripped of its criminality and horror. ”

“ It is a fact, however, in which we may acquiesce with no undue self-complacency, that the expedient of assassination, which the general sense of the present time disapproves under almost every condition of circumstances, was admitted and approved in the sixteenth century by the best men of all persuasions. ”

“ He was murdered; and I consider his murder unique in its excellence; for he was murdered at noon-day, and on the field of battle,—a feature of original conception, which occurs in no other work of art that I remember. Indeed, all of these assassinations may be studied with profit by the advanced connoisseur. They are all of them exemplaria, of which one may say,—
Nociurnâ versatâ manu, versate diurne;
Especially nocturnâ.
In these assassinations of princes and statesmen, there is nothing to excite our wonder; important changes often depend on their deaths ”

“ But they have a singular turn for homicide; their chief end of man is to murder, or to be murdered; oars, scythes, harpoons, crowbars, peatknives, and hayforks, are tools valued by them all the more for their charming aptitude for assassinations. ”

“ Notwithstanding all the efforts of government, assassinations are still committed, and the old family spirit of vengeance cannot be fully appeased; some important cases among the upper classes are now pending. ”

“ Great public assassinations, political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage of civilization, and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for an apron, dismally sponging out their work. ”

“ In extreme cases there are hints of more drastic measures in dealing with the traitors themselves—for so they were regarded—but 223 I do not think that any instance of assassination has been definitely made out for the time of which we are now speaking. ”

“ But of late years we are startled by a class of assassinations which can be explained only upon theories so complicated and so wholly unnatural that we seem to stand in the presence of an insolvable psychological puzzle. ”

“ As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them both just and popular is the adoption by murderers of a system of painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no hope that the people will renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style of executions endeared to them by memories and associations of the tenderest character. ”

“ Killing.—N. killing &c. v.; homicide, manslaughter, murder, assassination, trucidation|, iccusion|; effusion of blood; blood, blood shed; gore, slaughter, carnage, butchery; battue [obs3] . massacre; fusillade, noyade [obs3] ; thuggery, Thuggism [obs3] . deathblow, finishing stroke, coup de grace, quietus; execution &c. (capital punishment) 972; judicial murder; martyrdom. butcher, slayer, murderer, Cain, assassin, terrorist, cutthroat, garroter, bravo, Thug, Moloch, matador, sabreur [obs3] ”

“ Fearful, from all they had observed, that murder had been committed, they now ran with all their speed in the direction which the two persons had taken; and having arrived at a dark and lonely spot, to which they were attracted by groans of agony, they beheld, by the faint light of the moon, whose rays now penetrated through the thick foliage above their heads, the form of a man elegantly attired, stretched upon the earth and weltering in his blood, while by his side lay the pistol with which the fatal and cruel deed had been committed, and which the assassin had left behind him. ”

“ The exceptional treatment of hanging and then burning the body of the criminal was owing to the crime being, over and above that of murder, the particularly heinous one, in the eye of the old laws, of petit treason, the murdered person being the master of, and person in authority over, the assassin. ”

“ It is likewise some imperfect consolation, to reflect that the assassin has himself been killed, and probably by my own hand. The shedder of blood no longer lives to pursue his vocation, and justice is satisfied. ”

“ It is provided, as I humbly and devoutly believe, by the divine justice itself, that no matter how craftily murder is planned, there is always some point where the skill and cunning of the assassin fails him. ”

“ I burst into tears, and wept long, unrestrainedly; for I too was young; in my heart there was a flood of pent-up tenderness, and here I was, on this perfumed, moonlit, starlit night, crouching in a dark corner, meditating murder!
No, not murder, an execution. Has my stepfather deserved death? Yes. Is the executioner who lets down the knife on the neck of the condemned criminal to be called an assassin? No! Well, then I shall be the executioner and nothing else. ”

“ I had heard, and that from authority which appeared not to be doubted, that you had been mad enough to engage in a duel, notwithstanding all the principles which I have endeavored to instill into your mind; that you had killed your adversary, and that the slain man was your cousin Henry. Now I have ever held, and have endeavored to teach you to hold, that dueling is not only murder, but murder of the most aggravated kind. The slaughter of the man may take place by accident--by a hasty blow in a moment of passion--in self-defense, when suddenly assailed--or in a general tumult or commotion ”

“ The crowd rushing and eddying to and fro, the night, the yells, the pale faces, many fright [Pg 134] ened people trying in vain to extricate themselves, the attacked man, not yet freed from the jaws of death, looking like a corpse, the silent, resolute half dozen policemen, with no weapons but their little clubs, yet stern and steady through all those eddying swarms—made indeed a fitting side scene to the grand tragedy of the murder. ”

“ We have not been permitted to lift the veil, and show you the perpetrators of this horrible murder—a murder most atrocious in its inception, brutal and cowardly in its execution a crime which in many respects stands without a parallel. But the blood of a pure and honourable man, shed in the streets of your city, calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance, and I trust the cry will be heard and answered ”

“ Every old man and woman was killed, slain with a sword, or hacked to death, or speared. Babies, and little children were brained against the walls of the houses; strong men—fathers, lovers, sons—had been murdered with every wantonness of savagery conceivable. ”

“ But hast thou not more special sins than these,
No wrong, no murder?
KNIGHT. Murder have I none,
If murder be to kill a man by stealth
Or in a private quarrel, but in war
I oft have slain my man. I wear a sword
Though nature gave me not a butcher's hand
That loves to use it.—Oh, 't is marvellous
How men will slaughter for the sake of blood,
And Christians too. ”

“ These assassins, united in an association that could not be reached, strangled, in honor of the goddess of death, victims of every age, without ever shedding blood, and there was a time when the ground could not be dug up anywhere in this neighborhood without finding a corpse. ”

“ Death brooded palpably over the brown and grey Court, and held the tense faces of all in his thrall, and weighted every syllable of the speeches. Never was the irrelevancy of murder as a political weapon made more clear, and the fearful appropriateness of capital punishment seemed clear too, mystery requited with mystery. ”

“ How can they do that dreadful, deliberate murder—for I can call it nothing else—when the defenceless man stands by his coffin on the brink of his open grave, and the hands of his comrades send to his bosom the deadly messengers! It is not right to take life away ”

“ Besides, with us there is never, as with you, cool and deliberate murder perpetrated on the part of the assembly. There is here no turning up of the thumb. It is all honorable fighting, and honorable killing. ”

“ He struck the first blow. He killed. He struck the second blow then. He killed. He was striking and killing. There was one man at the end outside. When he came killing, drawing towards him, he went out of the row. He went up on the side of a hill.
“Death and destruction and the death-bands on you, champion of the red belt! It is you that are [90] doing the slaughter on this strand to-day. Don’t you know what country you came out of?—that it is out of a two-ended barrel you came in to the court and castle of the King of Greece?” ”

“ I am not here speaking of the legal definition of murder, but of murder as a term of moral reprobation, in which sense it must be used by those who speak of war as 'multitudinous murder.' They cannot mean murder in the legal sense, because in that sense only 'unlawful killing,' which killing in war is not, is murder. ”

“ To wake once more to killing, killing, killing.
Give me the hunter's hand, the patriot's fervour
To hold death naught, or for my land to serve her,
Slay and still slay, with heart that holds no sorrow
For these dead men and all their carnal horror.
Was I not one who loved my land for growing
Sweet, eager life, and pretty things all blowing?
How glad these hands to give their toil, how willing,
That now, O God ! grow strong in killing, killing. ”

“ Scarcely up next morning, when 'tat-tat-tat,' twenty or thirty people one after another, and the horses walking before the door from two till sunset, waiting for him. It was enough to kill a man—it was murder. ”

“ Keep in the sense of guard or defend implies that the defense is effectual. Compare CELEBRATE; RESTRAIN.
Prepositions:
Keep in hand, in mind, in or within the house; from evil; out of mischief; keep to the subject; keep for a person, an occasion, etc.
KILL. Synonyms:
To kill is simply to deprive of life, human, animal, or vegetable, with no suggestion of how or why. Assassinate, execute, murder, apply only to the taking of human life; to murder is to kill with premeditation and malicious intent; to execute is to kill in fulfilment of a legal sentence; to assassinate is to kill by assault ”