Political Assassination Quotes

If you will remember history correctly, even the Second World War was perpetrated by a stateless actor, by murdering the Prince Rudolf, if you remember. And so is the case with 9/11. It was a stateless actor which has made the world go to war.

Letters have been found with my name on assassination lists.

… assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad … would create a most serious moral and political problem.

We conclude that his [Patrice Lumumba’s] removal must be an urgent and prime objective of our covert action..

Regardless of moral considerations, assassination is a wrongheaded tool for a great power, because small powers can use it equally if not more effectively.

We now have an accepted practice of the President assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys. I think it’s sad.

Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.

A review of our files on the Letelier assassination has provided what we regard as convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder.

I kill kings and presidents first, and next all capitalists.

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

Everyone knows now that it was Nixon who wanted me liquidated. For a long time, the Americans dreamed of doing to me what they failed to do against Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs incident.

I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren't executed in that case were given life sentences, and two of those were with me in prison.

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.

Israel is the first democratic state—and from the end of the Second World War until now the only one—in which a political murder achieved its goal.

I believe [ Rajiv Gandhi] had a real sense that he would be assassinated.

True enough, Osama bin Laden is dead and other al-Qaeda leaders have joined him. But, the assassination of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi is a brutal reminder that radical Islamic terror groups have not disappeared and certainly are not dormant.

I don't think it's rational for a country to try to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador in a restaurant in Washington.

The committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.

Though there are some notable exceptions, by and large the persistent ranting of the Warren Commission critics, some of whom were screaming the word 'conspiracy' before the fatal bullet had even come to rest, came to remind me, as H. L. Mencken said in a different context, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.

Tories never actually talk about getting rid of their leader, then suddenly there is a flash of steel between the shoulder-blades and rigormortis sets in.

I believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John Kennedy. I believe that.

When my father returned home on the twenty-first of August 1983, he had a speech prepared. Filipinos never got to hear it, because he was murdered right on the tarmac.

I think that many people in history who had power were bumped off because they had power.

Then down came the lid--the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a "war to end war." But it merely ended art. It did not end war.

A political leader worthy of assassination