More GoJ - Notes and Quotes

Part two is dedicated to the analysis of several notorious serial killers. Gacy, Sutcliffe, Corll, "The Mad Butcher", etc. The evaluations (for lack of a better word) are all interesting, all insightful. But then it dawns on me like a bucket of ice water has just been dumped on my head that the man writing these things is also a killer. Which makes some of the things he says particularly harrowing.

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Bear in mind that the more you tell someone, the more dangerous they become to you and, therefore, the far more dangerous you become to them. (105)

Some individuals erroneously believe that if they master logic they will master life.

Logic is merely a tool. The science of argument. In that context it can be used to deduce what argument the serial killer is trying to put across by his actions, what he is trying to prove or disprove. (110)

More often than not it is foolish to try to kid a kidder. There are no saints in this world, only liars, lunatics and journalists. (151)

Religion is the deus ex machina of the misfortunate and oppressed. (159)

Normal life becomes insipid by comparison, once the adrenaline-charged high has been experienced, driving them insatiably, in a futile effort to capture and refrain the god-like charge of omnipotence, the ambience of divinity, the lofty gestalt of Olympus -- but some forget to take their oxygen masks before attempting such heights. (161)

Naught's had, all's spent, where our desire is got without
content: 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy than by destruction
dwell in doubtful joy. ~ Macbeth, Shakespeare

He would teach them the meaning of misery, of existential accounting. The enemy identified, the attack began, and the result is criminal history. So, when Ramirez sneered, 'I am beyond your experience,' he was to some extent perfectly right. We are all beyond one another's experience. But not so far beyond as the law-abiding would piously prefer to pretend. One fine day the dispossessed become the possessed. Beware the wrath of the disillusioned idealist; it knows no bounds. To seriously paraphrase Groucho Marx, such people end up declaiming they would never join any club that would accept them as a member.

In the modern inferno of crumbling inner cities, such militant outsiders now grow in number by the hour. With a little help and instruction from their friends.

Be in not the least doubt that they are coming to confront some of you. Read tomorrow's newspapers -- if mercy or accident has left you alive after encountering one of this number -- for you may be featured in them. Ponder, like Scrooge, that it is never to late to change direction. Or buy a gun. For all the prisons in the world shall not increase your vain hopes of safety one jot, only lessen them.

"In our course through life we shall meet the people who are
coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many
strange roads, and what it is set to us to do to them, and what
it is set to them to do to us, will all be done."

~ Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens (176)