Aaron Yoo Quotes

But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people.

There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

I'm always curious how we sometimes have a different point of view when it comes to justice. And that's why people root for 'Dexter.'

We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

Freedom was conditioned by man's physical body, heredity, and environment.

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

A crime is a crime, regardless of what collar you wear.

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.