People Charged With Crimes

"Our nation is unique. We grew out of a desire to worship God in a certain way; we grew from a number of other nations who were being prosecuted because of their faith. We have a wonderful culture, a wonderful, vibrant language. I want my people to be proud of who they are again."

"If you can't love two people at once, there's something wrong with you."

"Do you know something? I don't give a heck what those people think, I'm doing the right thing now."

"She might be violent."

"I will see you in heaven."

"Murder... murder... Can you prove it was murder? [...] I didn't think you could prove it was murder. She was dying in any event."

"I don't know what you mean. I don't keep a record."

"I don't want money. What use is it?"

"Easing the passing of a dying person isn't all that wicked. She wanted to die. That can't be murder. It is impossible to accuse a doctor."

"That was very wrong... I have had God's forgiveness for it."

"You do realise, doctor, that you have killed her?"

"A mercenary mercy killer who was prepared to sell death."

"An anonymous poem "Adams and Eves" circulated at the time of Adams' arrest finished:"

"The person who told you that doesn't know why I did it."

"Mrs Thomas has promised me her typewriter, I'll take it now."

"True patriots all; for be it understood We left our country for our country’s good."

"There are tough men but let me tell you I know from experience that really dangerous men have no pity. I'm not an unreasonable man but if you are a man and you take a liberty with me or cross me, then believe what I say: When it comes to retribution I have no pity or conscience. If that makes me the devil, then the devil I am, but I haven't got horns sticking out of my head or cloven hooves and a tail but if you're unlucky enough to have me come after you, beware cos hell's coming with me."

"I should focus on other important issues like people's livelihoods and the economy."

"People can go to the extreme like what we saw during the Cultural Revolution. For instance, in China, when people take everything into their own hands, then you cannot govern the place. … [It] was the people taking power into their own hands. Now that is what you mean by democracy if you take it to the full swing."

"All of the members of my new team have displayed in their work a strong sense of pragmatism that I promote. … While the backgrounds of principal officials are diverse, they all share a common commitment to our country, our territory and our people and agree with my governing philosophy."

"The life expectancy in Hong Kong is among the highest in the world … you can come to only one conclusion: we have the most environmentally friendly place for people, for executives, for Hong Kong people to live"

"In order to reach universal suffrage we need to build trust."

"I have been reading a book by my favourite author, Jeffrey Archer called "The Eleventh Commandment". I crave your indulgence to relate a small part of the book because it illustrates both the power of the media and the good it can do. It is fictional of course but it is nevertheless credible and may happen in real life. In this book the head of the CIA, one tough lady who used to order the assassination of an embarrassing foreign politician without bothering to inform the President, was castigated by the latter for the alleged CIA killing of a Presidential candidate in Columbia. The Director calmly denied that the assassination was by one of her boys. She then decided that the CIA hitman must be liquidated. The man was sent to Russia to kill another Presidential candidate, a particularly obnoxious ex- Communist. The CIA network then arranged for the hitman to be arrested by the Russians for attempted killing of the candidate who later won the election. The hitman will of course be executed since this is Russia, a country that has not yet heard about human rights and the cruelty of legitimately taking human lives. In the meantime the wife of the hitman contacted his secretary to find out where he is. The secretary being infatuated with our hero finally discovered that he is the man reported by a Turkish newspaper to have been arrested in Leningrad for attempted assassination of the Communist Presidential candidate. On her way to inform the wife she was killed through a road accident arranged by the CIA. When the wife finally discovered the fate of her friend, she rang up the deputy director of the CIA who promptly denied that he knew any such person as the husband of the caller or the secretary of the husband. When the wife pointed out that he was actually at her party recently and had talked to the secretary concerned he told her that she must be imagining as he does not know her or had been to her house. At this stage she came up with her trump card. It seemed her daughter had video-taped the party and there was a scene of him talking to the secretary. For good measure she said that the conversation she was having with the deputy director was being recorded and if he tried to dispose her off or to search for the tapes, the T.V. networks would receive full copies of the video-tape of the party and the telephone conversation. At the mention of the T.V. networks getting the tapes the attitude of the deputy director changed completely. Now you can see how the media can play a powerful role in ensuring that justice will be done and the miscreants prevented from misusing their power."

"I'm what you might call centre-right but I've always disliked the right wing as much as I've disliked the left wing."

"De chiens, d'oyseaulx, d'armes, d'amous," Chascun le dit a la vollee, "Pour une joye cent doulours."

"But where is last year's snow? This was the greatest care that Villon, the Parisian poet, took."

"There has been no greater artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself."

"Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name."

"The Large Testament is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's Don Juan and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter writer – except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from no other language known to me – he bears a particular resemblance."

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free," or so Friedrich Engels recounts Martyr's words."

"Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit. Ie suis paillart, la paillarde me suit. Lequel vault mieulx? Chascun bien s'entresuit. L'ung vault l'autre; c'est a mau rat mau chat. Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit; Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit, En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat."

"Prince, aux dames Parisiennes De beau parler donnez le pris; Quoy qu'on die d'Italiennes, Il n'est bon bec que de Paris."

"Mais, quoy que soit du laboureux mestier, Il n'est tresor que de vivre a son aise."

"Deux estions et n’avions qu'ung cuer."

"En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir."

"Folles amours font le gens bestes: Salmon en ydolatria, Samson en perdit ses lunettes. Bien est eureux qui riens n'y a!"

"Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?"

"Mes jours s'en sont allez errant."

"Bien est verté que j'ay amé Et ameroie voulentiers; Mais triste cuer, ventre affamé Qui n'est rassasié au tiers M'oste des amoureux sentiers. Au fort, quelqu'ung s'en recompence, Qui est ramply sur les chantiers! Car la dance vient de la pance."

"Freres humains qui après nous vivez, N'avez les cuers contre nous endurcis."

"Prince, je congnois tout en somme, Je congnois coulourez et blesmes, Je congnois Mort qui tout consomme, Je congnois tout, fors que moy mesmes."

"Even European philosophers have taken notice that most of what we take for knowledge is nothing but bias and prejudice."

"This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release."

"I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society."

"But a kind of genius can come of this deprivation of sensation, of experience. It has been mistaken as naïve intelligence, when in fact it is empty intelligence, pure intelligence. The composition of the mind is altered. Its previous cultivation is disintegrated and it has greater access to the brain, the body: it is Supersanity. Learning is turned inside out. You have to start from the top and work your way down. You must study mathematical theory before simple arithmetic; theoretical physics before applied physics; anatomy, you might say, before you can walk."

"The intelligence recedes, no more a tool of learning - because knowledge is based on experience - but a tool of the outside world it is deprived of knowing. It tries to contact other minds by telepathy; it becomes the Ancestor. Words and Numbers come to hold mystic significance: they were invented by some arcane magic older than man. The line between the word and the thing vanishes; the intervals of numbers in infinity collapse with infinity."

"The mind does not regulate its own condition. Mental depression, for example, is a state of mind caused by the body. In a cell in the hole it only seems that there is a separation of mind and body - in fact, the body's condition (of deprivation of sensations; experiences, functions, and so on) controls the moods of the mind more than in any other situation I can think of."

"Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself."

"The world is amazed at how 'cruel' it is! (This is very funny to think about!) And then, when the 'chips are down' (Sartre's favorite expression), Sartre, who has never gambled but is enamored of the terminology of a kind of daring that doesn't involve getting his ass skinned, 'martyrs' himself. It is the same kind of responsibility anyone takes upon himself by submitting to your bad opinion of him by hanging his head and agreeing with all the accusations - and then, when he has done that, forlornly tells you he is sorry it rained last night, sorry the price of tea went up, etc. etc."

"Leona Helmsley is a truly evil human being. She treated employees worse than any human being I've ever witnessed and I've dealt with some of the toughest human beings alive."