219 Crime Quotes

I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.

Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

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 believe that the Government's first duty is to defend its citizens, to defend them against the harms that come out of hate.

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

He thinks he can use the jail for networking to be somebody. In that way, he's always operating.

He wanted to be a lawyer, couldn't afford it, so he started dealing to go to college - good intention.

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

If there were mistakes, there were mistakes. But a man has to have a line of work, no?

Stupidity is always a capital crime.

If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.

A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.

Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.

So long as large sums of money are involved - and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal - it is literally impossible to stop the traffic, or even to make a serious reduction in its scope.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

I would like to like to make one thing clear at the very outset and that is, when you speak of a train robbery, this involved no loss of train, merely what I like to call the contents of the train, which were pilfered. We haven't lost a train since 1946, I believe it was - the year of the great snows when we mislaid a small one.

Punishment is not prevention. History offers cold comfort to those who think grievance and despair can be subdued by force.

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

There is a difference. If you kill to take money or rob, it is plain murder, but if you kill because of political reasons, that is a political murder.

It's about time law enforcement got as organized as organized crime.

The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.

When I was a fetus, I used to sneak out at night when my mother was sleeping. I figured I should start stealing stuff while I still had no fingerprints.

Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

Crime, family dissolution, welfare, and low levels of social organization are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

Homosexuality in Russia is a crime and the punishment is seven years in prison, locked up with the other men. There is a three year waiting list.

From the people who brought you 'zero tolerance,' I present the Gun-Free Zone! Yippee! Problem solved! Bam! Bam! Everybody down! Hey, how did that deranged loner get a gun into this Gun-Free Zone?

I have to say I'm all for public flogging. One type of criminal that a public humiliation might work particularly well with are the juvenile delinquents, a lot of whom consider it a badge of honor to be sent to juvenile detention. And it might not be such a cool thing in the 'hood' to be flogged publicly.

The greatest crimes are not those committed for the sake of necessity but those committed for the sake of superfluity. One does not become a tyrant to avoid exposure to the cold.

My luck is getting worse and worse. Last night, for instance, I was mugged by a Quaker.

War is a crime which involves all other crimes.

The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime-for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.

Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

I am going to St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job - it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.

When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality.

Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in the United States is closely connected with this.

If you wanna get away with murder, shoot him in the head and put a demo tape in their pocket!

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made, not to understand, but to feel, as crime.

There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side commits it.

This could never be a crime in any society which deems itself enlightened.

People are always shocked when they ask me what I plan to do about crime as governor and my answer comes back as 'Nothing!' Does the issue of crime need to be addressed? You bet it does. But, just as with many other social issues, I don't think that legislation is the most effective arena in which to fight crime. We already have tons of laws on the books. Most of those laws would work more effectively if we just enforced them better. As governor, there isn't a lot I can do beyond that to crack down on crime. Law enforcement is really a local issue. It's the cops' job to tighten down on criminals. Politicians always like to say 'I'm gonna fight crime!' because it makes them sound great and gets them votes. But what can a politician do to fight crime?

Punishment is the last and least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes.

Outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store...with a pricing gun. She said, 'Give me all of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store.'

The same crime element that white people are scared of black people are scared of. While they waiting for legislation to pass, we next door to the killer. All them killers they let out, they're in that building. Just because we black, we get along with the killers? What is that? We need protection too.

A man won't steal, ordinarily, unless that which he steals is something he cannot as easily get without stealing; in liberty the cost of stealing would involve greater difficulties than producing, and consequently he would not be apt to steal. But suppose a man steals. Today you go to a representative of that power which has robbed you of the earth, of the right of free contract of the means of exchange, taxes you for everything you eat or wear (the meanest form of robbery), - you go to him for redress from a thief!

I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one. On that basis it would not, as a matter of policy merely, be an economical institution.

I think crime pays. The hours are good, you meet a lot of interesting people, you travel a lot.

What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?

From behind the time locks of courtrooms and from the worlds of darkness, I did let loose devils and demons with the power of scorpions to torment.

Maybe I should have killed four-five hundred people, then I would have felt better. Then I would have felt like I really offered society something.

I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

I would like this to end as quickly as possible so we know the facts and if someone committed a crime they will no longer work in my administration.

Having a substance should not be considered a crime, because so far it's victimless. If you want to talk about distributing substances that are lethal, yeah, that oughta be brought up, but then, let's be serious. Tobacco is far ahead of anything else. Alcohol is second. Hard drugs are way down the bottom, and furthermore most drug use, though it's very harmful for the person, has very little social effect. The crime associated with hard drugs is mostly a consequence of criminalization. [Q: so should we go after the people who make cigarettes?] If the principle is, let's not get lethal substances out to the public, the first one you'd go after is tobacco, the next one you'd go after is alcohol, way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana. [Q: a lot more violence comes from someone snorting some coke?] No, it doesn't. It comes from purchasing coke and selling coke, but that's because it's illegal. That's because of the criminalization of it, not the effect. There're good studies of this. Tobacco doesn't happen to cause violence, but alcohol definitely does. The deaths that are alcohol related are way beyond the deaths that are hard drugs related, if you separate, in the hard drugs case, the deaths that are the result of criminalization. So yeah, when you have drug gangs and narcotraffickers fighting for turfs and so on, sure, then there's gonna be plenty of killings. Just like when you had Al Capone running Chicago. But that's a consequence of the criminalization, not the drugs. What drugs tend to do is make people passive. Alcohol on the other hand makes them violent. There're extensive studies in the criminality literature, and you can take a look at the results. The basic result is that tobacco related deaths are way beyond anything else, just an order of magnitude greater. Furthermore those are not just to the user, they're to everybody else. So deaths from passive smoking alone are much higher than drug related deaths. Furthermore they're transferred on to the next generation. Alcohol is the next biggest killer, and it's a killer not only to the people who use it, which is bad enough, but also to others, because of its relation to violence. Next is things like hard drugs, and they are rarely harmful to others, they're harmful to the user. When you get down to marijuana, last time I looked there had been about 60 million users and not one known case of overdose. I mean it's not good for you, undoubtably, but it's probably at the level of coffee. And in fact notice that there has never been a medical reason for criminalizing marijuana. I've looked through the history of this if you're interested, I don't know if you want me to run through it, but it's an interesting history. Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people. So for example in England in the 19th century, there was a period when gin was criminalized and whiskey wasn't, because gin is what poor people drink. That's kinda like the sentencing for crack and powder. In the early stages of Prohibition in the United States, one of the targets was immigrant workers, these guys hanging around the saloons in New York, gotta go after them. The rich guys in upstate New York, they're gonna drink no matter what, you know, they wanna come home after work, they'll drink. But, go after those guys. What about marijuana? Marijuana was brought in by Mexicans, and the first criminalization of marijuana was in the southwest, in the states. It was in New Mexico, later Utah, and so on, and it was specifically targeted against Mexicans. It didn't get criminalized in the United States until shortly after Prohibition ended. After Prohibition ended we had this huge bureau of narcotics, and it had to do something. So they discovered, you know, that marijuana is gonna do all kind of terrible things to you. The Senate testimony about this is mind-boggling. They did have a representative of the American Medical Association, who said we don't have any medical evidence about this. He was shut up, denounced, you know, get rid of him right away. Then they found somebody else, this is literally true, they found a pharmacologist, a guy teaching at Temple University, who was doing experiments with marijuana and dogs. The testimony is hilarious, you really have to read it. They brought this guy and he testified that when he gave marijuana to dogs they went insane, you know, they'd do all kind of things. And then, some senator or somebody asked him, this is from memory, so it's probably a little off, but something like this, it's in the thirties. They asked the guy, well have you ever tried marijuana on humans? So he said, yeah, he tried it on himself. And he said, well, what happened? He said, I turned into a vulture, I started flying around the room. So they, oh my god, this stuff is terrible, it makes people insane. And it was declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But then something happened. It turned out that lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense. So if a guy who killed 3 cops, his lawyer would say, well, you know, he had marijuana before so he was insane, so you can't do anything. And people were getting off on charges, like cop killing for example, on the claim that they had marijuana. So all of a sudden it was discovered that marijuana doesn't make you insane. Congress decided, sorry, it doesn't make you insane, because we wanna wipe that out. The next idea was, marijuana is an entry drug, it's the drug you take and then you go on to something else. Well, there was never any evidence for that, but that was decided. And then in the early fifties, something else happened, marijuana is being brought in here by Red Chinese to poison the American population and destroy us. So therefore we gotta stop marijuana. And it kinda goes on like this. Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people.

Rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth. And it happens every few minutes. (1991)

One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood... In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror's chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to the wild beasts in front of the assembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and the judgment remained unclouded. But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment. On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence - through a curious transposition peculiar to our times - it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.

You can't have shit when you around niggers, you can't have shit. You can't have no big screen TV! You can have it, but you better move it in at 3 in the morning. Paint it white, hope niggers think it's a bassinet. Can't have shit in your house! Why?! Because niggers will break into your house. Niggers that live next door to you break into your house, come over the next day and go, 'I heard you got robbed.' Nigger, you know you robbed me. You didn't see shit 'cause you was doing shit!

'No no, Jock:we're going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we'll undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love.' 'I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife.' 'I never think of policemen's wives, their beauty maddens me like wine.'

His eye so dim, So wasted each limb, That, heedless of grammar, they all cried, 'THAT 'S HIM! That 's the scamp that has done this scandalous thing! That 's the thief that has got my Lord Cardinal's Ring!'

By committing a crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so. Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by law. The need for punishment is not satisfied where, as is generally the case, the penal code is merely a method of exercising pressure through fear. [p.103]

Malefactors of great wealth.

But Want of Money & the Distress of A Thief can never be alleged as the Cause of his Thieving, for many honest people endure greater hard ships with Fortitude. We must therefore seek the Cause else where than in want of Money for that is the Misers passion, not the Thiefs.

A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.

To force solitude on a man who has just come to understand that he is not alone, is that not the definitive crime against man?

A couple [of] alleged males attempted to sucker punch a 100-pound woman and missed. And they ended up with their faces smashed in and spending the night in the Pima County Jail, where I'm sure - being good liberals - their views on gay marriage will serve them well.

White-collar crime convictions are deterrents, I've seen a lot of that. Imprisoning heads of state is a deterrent, too. It doesn't happen very often.

Once for all, then, we are not opposed to the punishment of thieves and murderers; we are opposed to their manufacture.

If the defenders of privilege desire to exclude from this country the opponents of privilege, they should see to it that Congress omits the taking of the eleventh census. For the eleventh census, if taken, will undoubtedly emphasize these two lessons of the tenth: first, that foreign immigration does not increase dishonesty and violence among us, but does increase the love of liberty; second, that the population of the world is gradually dividing into two classes, Anarchists and criminals.

I'm especially interested in Dubai's connection to the Bombay criminal underworld. Most zealots with guns gravitate toward organized crime, because it's a lot easier to have money and buy gunmen than it is to have gunmen and get money.

But death, fires, and burglary, make all men equals...

Is this the 5 o'clock free crack giveaway?!

'Will I still be able to traffic rocks to the community?'

I'm not so interested in the act of murder as in the echoes and repercussions of the act, and how they play out over time.

Well, I'm not interested in murder so much in the aspects of, you know, sleuthing and detection and that sort of thing. I'm much more interested in the echoes and repercussions of the act through time.

For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!

Well, the man don't just have to die, Foley. I mean, he could accidentally hurt himself falling down on something real hard, you know? Like a shiv, or my dick?

I know a guy who walks into a bank with a little glass bottle. He tells everyone it's nitroglycerin. He scores some money off the teller, walks out. On his way out, the bottle breaks, he slips on it and knocks himself out. The 'nitro' was Canola oil. I know more fucked-up bank robbers than ones who know what they're doing. I doubt if one in twenty could tell you where the dye pack is. Most bank robbers are fucking morons.

He is capable of any crime, from reviling the Classics to diverting water courses.

When I saw the newspaper headline 'Gas Chamber Expert Captured' and an American lieutenant explained it to me, I was pale in amazement. How can they say such things about me? I told you I was only in charge of the Intelligence Service from 1943 on. The British even admitted that they tried to assassinate me because of that, not because of having anything to do with atrocities, you can be sure of that.

At the heart of every great fortune lies a great crime.

It is base to filch a purse, daring to embezzle a million, but it is great beyond measure to steal a crown. The sin lessens as the guilt increases.

I distinguish between maniacs and crazy people. A maniac will beat 9 people to death with a steel dildo. A crazy person will beat 9 people to death with a steel dildo, but he'll be wearing a Bugs Bunny suit at the time.

If Frank Sinatra owed you a favor, you should ask him to have one of his buddies kill Andy Williams.

My appointees to the [Texas] board of pardons and paroles reflect my no-nonsense approach to crime and punishment. They believe people who commit crimes against innocent Texans should pay the consequences; they believe sentences imposed by juries should be carried out.

The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublie, parce qu'il a ete proprement fait.