Famous quotes containing the words criminal, background and/or check:
“Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very barroom of the minds inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us,the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide?”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Pilate with his question What is truth? is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900)
“cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres
Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.”
—Dylan Thomas (19141953)