quotations about crime
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists.
ALBERT CAMUS
Resistance
I think crime pays. The hours are good, you meet a lot of interesting people, you travel a lot.
WOODY ALLEN
Take the Money and Run
The crime contains its own punishment.
K. J. PARKER
The Escapement
There are crimes that, like frost on flowers, in one single night destroy character and reputation.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
And the poor wretch in the dock. He is stunted and ugly and forlorn. He has committed a crime. His whole being seems to radiate criminality. He looks the thing he is accused of being. People frown and glance away. And yet society has made the wretch what he is, exactly as society has made the Judge what he is. And not satisfied with making him the wretch he is, society is punishing him for being what he is, exactly as society is rewarding the Judge for being what he is.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Prisoners of Prejudice", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
All men have crimes, and most of them are hidden.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
A crime arising from a sudden passion is not so great as when the same ariseth from long meditation. For in the former case, there is a place for extenuation, in the common infirmity of human nature, but he that doth it with premeditation, has used circumspection and cast his eye on the law, on the punishment, and on the consequence thereof to human society.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause.
CLARENCE DARROW
Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
The man that does not fear punishment, little regards crime.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
To revenge crime is important, but to prevent it is more so.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
"The Adventure of the Illustrious Client", The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behaviour that is often considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
ROBERT RICE
The Business of Crime
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Anarchism: What It Really Stands For,", Anarchism and Other Essays
He who helps the guilty, shares the crime.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
Sententiae
Crime is as much a condition as an intention.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Commit a crime and the world is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Compensation,", Essays
But there is a complementary faith among the damned which involves their gathering of the stones with which those who walk in the light shall stone them; or there exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes if which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The crime and not the scaffold makes the shame.
PIERRE CORNEILLE
Essex
Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.
H.G. WELLS
A Modern Utopia
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Anarchism