Crime Quotes

If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

The press is called the Fourth Estate. It is definitely a power, but, to misuse that power is criminal.

Suppose . . . burglars had made entry into this . . . [library]. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress.

I want to rob a bank with a BB gun. "Give me all your money or I will give you a dimple! I will be rich, you will be cute. We both win."

Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

O. J. Simpson has already received the ultimate punishment: For the rest of his life he has to associate with golfers.

The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced.

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes, which you say you have heard insisted on by some, I assure you was never mine.

Our freedom is also incomplete, dear compatriots, as long as we are denied our security by criminals who prey on our communities, who rob our businesses and undermine our economy, who ply their destructive trade in drugs in our schools, and who do violence against our women and children.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

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.

When there is crime in society, there is no justice.

We shall look on crime as a disease, and its physicians shall displace the judges, its hospitals displace the Galleys. Liberty and health shall be alike. We shall pour balm and oil where we formerly applied iron and fire; evil will be treated in charity, instead of in anger. This change will be simple and sublime.

If anyone knew where they were, I'd send the ISDBB (Incredibly Stupid and Dumb Beyond Belief) award to the two guys who tried to break in to the Ohio penitentiary.

Collective crimes incriminate no one.

[People] earn extra money [in prison] selling contraband, dope, and things of that sort to the inmates, and so that really it's an exploiter.

The pillory and stocks, the gibbet, and even the whipping-post, have seen many a noble victim, many a martyr. But I cannot think any save the most ignoble criminals ever sat in a ducking-stool.

The criminal is quite frequently not equal to his deed: he belittles and slanders it.

The punishment of criminals should be of use; when a man is hanged he is good for nothing.

I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.

The government is responsible for the violence, as long as they don't stop it. And if we have to get violent to protect ourselves, then it's the government that should be charged with the crime, because we're only upholding a law that they've been unable to uphold.

We don't give our criminals much punishment, but we sure give 'em plenty of publicity.

Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.

History is the study of the world's crime

Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

Last week I was walking by a cemetery, two guys came after me with shovels. It was all about money.

The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods. It remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime. It is no more entitled to respect than is the flag of a pirate.

I'm just trying to change my life because I'm not above killing any drug dealer for money.

One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.

Every murder or other injury, no matter for what cause, committed or inflicted on another is a crime against humanity.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.

Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.

They [the Reagan Administration] want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals. They're against street crime, providing that street isn't Wall Street.

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other. They are worse than ever when, at the termination of their punishment, they return to society.

Destruction is not the law of humans. Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him. Every murder or other injury, no matter for what cause, committed or inflicted on another is a crime against humanity.

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

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. That is where the true evil lies.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I was in for. I said I'd killed an Arab and they were all silent

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.

Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.

Rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth and it happens every few minutes. The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves. What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape. Go to the source and start there.

I always thought what an interesting idea because almost everybody's fascinated by the perpetrator of a crime; very few people study what happens to people for the rest of their lives, and how it affects not only that particular character but other characters around him as well.