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.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

I don't hold it against the men who beat me because undoubtedly there are some ruffians of every nationality and the English are not exceptions.

Pohl I did not know at all except, of course, that I had heard of him and perhaps I did see him occasionally at the Fuhrer's headquarters or at large meetings. But that a man could be in charge of all the concentration camps in Germany, Himmler's right-hand man without a doubt, making him one of the great criminals of our age - what sort of man is he? Does he talk? Does he proclaim innocence like Kaltenbrunner? I really can't understand such people.

Hunger makes a thief of any man.

'They say money don't stink,' he said. 'I sometimes wonder.'

There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.

'Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.'

There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long time ago - no man can recall how far back - the Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man's pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best essays in support of the practice.

He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him.

Of crimes injurious to the persons of private subjects, the most principal and important is the offense of taking away that life, which is the immediate gift of the great creator; and which therefore no man can be entitled to deprive himself or another of, but in some manner either expressly commanded in, or evidently deducible from, those laws which the creator has given us; the divine laws, I mean, of either nature or revelation.

Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table

You gotta see English crime. It's hilarious, you don't know if you're reading the front page or the comic section over there. I swear to God. I read an article front page of the paper one day, in England, 'Yesterday, some Hooligans knocked over a dustbin in Shaftesbury.' ...Wooooo. 'The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! ...What if they become ruffians? I would hate to be a dustbin in Shaftesbury tonight. (to the tune of 'Behind Blue Eyes' by The Who) No one knows what it's like... to be a dustbin... in Shaftesbury... with hooligans...'

Suppose you wanted to kill people. You would need to know ahead of time how to do it. That part is not too difficult. There are many ways. Some of them are better than others. Most of them have drawbacks. So you use what knowledge you've got, and you invent a new way. You think, and you think, and you think, and you come up with the perfect method. You pay a lot of attention to the setup. Because the perfect method is not an easy method, and careful preparation is very important. But that stuff is meat and potatoes to you. You have no problem with careful preparation. No problem at all. How could you, with your intelligence? After all your training? You know the big problems will come afterward. How do you make sure you get away with it? You use your knowledge. You know more than most people about how the cops work. You've seen them on duty many times, sometimes close-up. You know what they look for. So you don't leave anything for them to find. You go through it all in your head, very precisely and very exactly and very carefully. Just as carefully as you would mark the play card you knew for sure was going to win you a fortune.

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Lauren Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.

The same sort of arguments advanced by many libertarians, such as Rep. Paul, to 'explain' the anti-American actions of foreign terrorists, also have been offered by liberals to 'explain' the heinous acts of common criminals. Read any sociology or criminology text, and you'll find endless laundry lists of 'causal explanations' for crime: poverty, neglect, poor parenting, lousy schools, poor 'socialization,' inadequate pre-natal care, hunger, disease, bullying, racism, police brutality, social stigmatizing, untreated psychological disorders, victimless-crime laws...you name it. [...] Ron Paul has become the most visible exponent of that malignant view of America. In my mind, his 'blowback' excuse for 9/11 -- and 'excuse' is exactly what his 'explanation' amounts to -- is sufficient to completely disqualify him for any American public office, let alone for the role of commander in chief of the U.S. military.