Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.

Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.

They are not Artificial Intelligence (AI)--generated monsters or Marvel comic book superheroes as often depicted in fictional series. The majority are not mentally ill. They are human beings, they could be your neighbour. Many people would presume that serial killers would be super intelligent, but they are not. They are normal people with average intelligence; few are intelligent and most are not.

Serial killers are not monsters; they are human beings with tortured souls. I will never condone what they do, but I can understand them.

You have many wonderful qualities, Virtue—you lie and cheat and blackmail and bluff with great panache, and you’re thoroughly delightful in bed—but you simply aren’t a skilled professional killer.

Serial killers do, on a small scale, what governments do on a large one. They are a product of the times and these are bloodthirsty times. Even psychopaths have emotions if you dig deep enough. Then again, maybe they don't.

Serial killers exist there, and if one really wants to find them, that is where one has to look. One cannot begin to understand a serial killer's mind if one is unprepared and if one does not know what they feel. One does not have to be raped to acquire empathy for a rape victim. I did not have to kill to understand why others do, but I had to go through some harrowing experiences in order to understand.

I believe the term ‘serial killer’ is highly misleading, in that it implicitly suggests to the general public that murder is the paramount object or motivating urge in the mind of the killer … They naturally attribute this motivation partly because they value human life above all else, and partly because, as their endless fascination with the subject suggests, they have a vague conception of murder as being somehow mystical, highly dramatic, or even a nebulously romantic experience, replete with unimaginable connotations of eroticism. And guilt for it must be paid for in full.

Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time the wish to kill-though not the will to kill.

I am not a killer. I just win - Thoroughly - After all, winning isn't everything but wanting to win is.

In the past, socializing men to become the best killer-protectors led to the survival of the “fittest.” In the future, with nuclear technology, training killers is more likely to lead to the destruction of everyone.

What kind of sex attacker reneges at the first scream?

Yes, I repeat it: it's society that makes criminals and you jurymen, rather than striking them, you should use your intelligence and your powers to transform society. At once you would suppress all crime; and your work, in attacking the causes, would be greater and more fecund than your justice that limits itself to punishing the effects.

What are murderers like? Some of them, have been thoroughly nice chaps.