Selected crime quotes

1. Virgin territory for whorehouses.

2. 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.

3. The answer to crime is not gun control, it is law enforcement and self-control.

4. Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

5. 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.

6. There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.

7. 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.

8. Mordre wol out, that se we day by day.

9. The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.

10. 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.

11. God bless the homicidal maniacs. They make life worthwhile.

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

13. We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.

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

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

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

17. 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.

18. 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.

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

20. Stupidity is always a capital crime.

21. 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.

22. 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.

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

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

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

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

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

30. 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.

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

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

33. 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.

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

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

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

37. 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.

38. 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?

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. 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.

42. 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!

43. 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?

44. 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.

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

46. 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.

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

48. 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.

49. 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.

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

51. 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.

52. 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.

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

54. The hard core, the outlaw elite, were the Hell's Angels... wearing the winged death's-head on the back of their sleeveless jackets and packing their 'mamas' behind them on big 'chopped hogs.' They rode with a fine unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom.

55. Satan's Slaves, number three in the outlaw hierarchy, custom-bike specialists with a taste for the flesh of young dogs, flashy headbands and tender young blondes with lobotomy eyes.

56. She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don't think it's crazy at all and I don't think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what's being crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it.

57. I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind.

58. We shouldn't be wasting so much time and so many resources on prosecuting consensual crimes such as prostitution and drug possession. I hold drug possession and drug dealing as two totally different concepts. The drug dealers who resort to deadly street violence should be dealt with severely as the criminals they are. But we have to become willing to admit as a nation that our war against drugs has failed. And we have to start looking for other solutions. I want the drug business stopped. But I know it never will stop as long as people want the drugs. It's supply and demand. You can even get drugs in prison.

59. Winona Ryder wouldn't shoplift this!

60. Fay: Have you given a thought to the priest? Truscott: We can't have him in on it, miss. Our percentage wouldn't be worth having. Fay: Mr McLeavy threatened to expose us. Truscott: I've been exposed before. Fay: What happened? Truscott: I arrested the man. He's doing twelve years.

61. In New York, crossing 58th Street from the Plaza Oyster Bar to the Wyndham Hotel, I came up against a huge black man in a long, dark overcoat who said, in deep and threatening tones, 'Give me fifty dollars!' I managed to ask him if he would be content with thirty-five and, rather to my surprise, he said, 'All right, give me thirty-five dollars!' And so the deal was done.

62. 'Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions,' murmmured Lonnrot. 'Like Christianity,' the editor put in.

63. 'It is more than a crime; it is a political fault,' -words which I record, because they have been repeated and attributed to others.

64. Don't worry. Your friends are dead and you are going to join them.

65. 'I emphasise again that people who participated in the 2000 uprising with criminal intent, as established by the police, will continue to be subject to the full force of the law. The Bill is not intended to provide relief to those who used the coup for their own gain or other criminal intent.' (14 June 2005)

66. One can insult an honest man or an honest woman, but to tell a thief that he is a thief is merely la constation d'un fait [The establishing of a fact.]

67. He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history.

68. The Jew is not a disturber of the peace of any country. Even his enemies will concede that. He is not a loafer, he is not a sot, he is not noisy, he is not a brawler nor a rioter, he is not quarrelsome. In the statistics of crime his presence is conspicuously rare - in all countries. With murder and other crimes of violence he has but little to do: he is a stranger to the hangman. In the police court's daily long roll of 'assaults' and 'drunk and disorderlies' his name seldom appears ...

69. 'Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev,' Policy Review, Fall 1987, by Michael Johns.

70. The cops aren't exactly dumb, you know. We can get our own answers. Not like I can. That's why you buzzed me so fast. You can figure things out as quickly as I can, but you haven't got the ways and means of doing the dirty work. That's where I come in. You'll be right behind me every inch of the way, but when the pinch comes I'll get shoved aside and you slap the cuffs on. That is, if you can shove me aside. I don't think you can.

71. The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in. 'How could you?' she gasped. I had only a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. 'It was easy,' I said.

72. The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand. I kept rubbing my face to wipe out the fuzz that clouded my mind but the cops wouldn't let me. One would pull my hand away and shout a question at me that made my head ache even worse and another would slap me with a wet rag until I felt like I had been split wide open.

73. The little guy's face was a bloody mess. Between the puffballs of blue-black flesh that used to be eyelids, the dull gleam of shock-deadened pupils watched Dilwick uncomprehendingly. His lips were swollen things of lacerated skin, with slow trickles of blood making crooked paths from the corners of his mouth through the stubble of a beard to his chin, dripping onto a stained shirt. Dilwick stood just outside the glare of the lamp, dangling like the Sword of Damocles over the guy's head. He was sweating too. His shirt clung to the meaty expanse of his huge neck. He pushed his beefy hand further into the leather glove and swung. The solid smack of his open hand on the little guy's jaw was nasty. His chair went over backward and his head cracked against the concrete floor of the room like a ripe melon. Dilwick put his hands on his hips and glared down at the caricature that once was human.

74. They had dropped the body behind a pile of cement blocks from a partly shattered wall, pulling a broken section of sheetrock over to hide it from casual view. But there's nothing casual about a little kid who liked to play in junk and found himself stumbling over the mutilated body of what had been a redheaded woman. At one time she would have been beautiful, but death had erased all that.

75. Imagine being killed by a bow and arrow. That would suck. An arrow killed you, they would never solve the crime. 'Look at that dead guy. Let's go that way.'

76. Ta vertu met ta gloire au-dessus de ton crime.

77. C'est un crime d'Etat que d'en pouvoir commettre.

78. The jails are full of one million non-readers. We can't let it happen again. If you allow another generation to grow up to be 12 years old... without the ability to read, write, and think, we're sunk. If they can't read, if they can't write, if they can't think, they become criminals. We've already lost two generations. Unless we teach reading intensely and completely in kindergarten and first grade, the whole civilization goes to hell.

79. Boxing took a weird turn when Mike Tyson bit somebody. LETS GET READY TO NIBBLE! And all these old guy were like 'He bit him oh dear Christ he bit him.' You're lucky he just bit him! Mike just got out of prison, you're lucky he didn't fuck him! Come on! You know biting is foreplay in prison. Mike would be going 'Break it up!' 'When I'm finished.' Mike's on Zoloft too. He said 'I'm on Zoloft so I don't kill you mother-fuckers.' I'm going 'Up the dosage, my man!'

80. What Charlize Theron achieves in Patty Jenkins' 'Monster' isn't a performance but an embodiment. With courage, art and charity, she empathizes with Aileen Wuornos, a damaged woman who committed seven murders. She does not excuse the murders. She simply asks that we witness the woman's final desperate attempt to be a better person than her fate intended.

81. They developed out of the situation. The courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I always objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time, Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn't want any more shootings, so we used gas chambers instead.

82. My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done.

83. Giuliani symbolizes the civic contributions that led to New York becoming one of the safest cities in the world, a city where people need no longer fear violence. [...] I believe that he has, through his political efforts, saved more human lives than most people alive today.

84. The crimes committed here foul the name and holiness of Jesus Christ in the eyes of the Iranian people.

85. I mean, why didn't these morons leave New Orleans before the hurricane? I'll tell you why: because they wanted to rape and loot! That's just the way some people are! And if they're black - if the rapists and looters are black - it's not George Bush's fault! We've had these problems ever since the Emancipation Proclamation. Once the whites leave town, all you've got is overwhelming lawlessness. That's not racism, Mr. Snerdley; it's a proven, demonstrable fact. Have you even seen a ghetto in Greenwich, Connecticut? I rest my case.

86. A murderer is a robber who got interrupted.

87. May God inspire these men sometime to come to their senses in regard to God again, so that they may repent, however latter day, of their grave crimes, namely homicide against the brothers of the Lord, and that they free these baptized women whom they have taken, so that then they may deserve to live to God and be made whole once more, here, now and for eternity.

88. Please - please don't kill me - I don't want to die. I just want to have my baby.

89. The other day I was arrested for scalping low numbers at the deli.

90. That very night while gentle sleep The urchin's eyelids kissed, Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn, Through the cold and heavy mist; And Eugene Aram walked between, With gyves upon his wrist.

91. So many tried to plot/That I keep a glock beside my head, when will it stop?

92. En effet, l'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs.

93. This is not a question of expediency, but of right. In antebellum days the proposition was not, Are the blacks good enough to be free? but, Have they the right? So today the question is not, Will outrages result from freeing humanity? but, Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of happiness? In the transition epoch, surely crimes will come. Did the seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect Liberty to undo in a moment what Oppression has been doing for ages? Criminals are the crop of despots, as much a necessary expression of the evil in society as an ulcer is of disease in the blood; and so long as the taint of the poison remains, so long there will be crimes.

94. I've sent in my application to The Real World, so I'm puttin' a lotta eggs in that basket, the MTV basket. I also thought about getting a gun and becomin' a crack dealer. I wouldn't be, like, a mean crack dealer...I'd be a nice one. I'd just be like 'Hey, guys, what's up? You want some crack?'.

95. 'Their existence is a crime, Their seat, their robe, their tie, Their land deeds, Their hired guns, They're the crime!

96. '(to a diamond dealer) I got some stones I wanna get rid of. I whacked a fucker out last night and I need to get rid of these stones.'(from 'Diamond Dealer')

97. 'I shot a motherfucker in the face.' (from 'Mariposa')

98. In the struggles for the Islamic order, all means are permissible except one: crime. No one has the right to defile the good name of Islam by the uncontrolled and superfluous use of force. The Islamic community should once more confirm that justice is one of its keystones... Formula: the aim justifies the means has become the cause of numberless crimes. A noble aim cannot command unworthy means... - ibid., p. 49

99. The Prosecution holds me responsible for the concentration camps, for the destruction of Jewish life, for Einsatzgruppen and other things. All of this is neither in accord with the evidence nor with the truth. The accusers as well as the accused are exposed to the dangers of a summary proceeding. It is correct that I had to take over the Reich Security Main Office. There was no guilt in that in itself. Such offices exist in governments of other nations too. However, the task and activity assigned to me in 1943 consisted almost exclusively in the reorganization of the German political and military intelligence service, though not as Heydrich's successor. Almost a year after his death I had to accept this post under orders and as an officer at a time when suspicion fell on Admiral Canaris of having collaborated with the enemy for years. In a short time I ascertained the treason of Canaris and his accomplices to the most frightful extent.

100. Decline of the English Murder