Crime Quotes

Successful crimes alone are justified.

John Dryden

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

H. L. Mencken

The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.

Michel Foucault

The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.

Samuel Butler

Crime, like disease, is not interesting; it is something to be done away with by general consent, and that is all about it.

Anon.

Many commit the same crime with a different destiny; one bears a cross as the price of his villainy, another wears a crown.

Juvenal

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891

The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.paraphrased as: Behind every great fortune there is a crime

Honore de Balzac, Father Goriot

As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.

Christopher Hitchens

How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.

Henry George

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.

Jean Genet

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

Freda Adler

The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame.

Christopher Hitchens

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.

Henry Miller

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

Kurt Vonnegut

Despotism is a long crime.

Victor Hugo

Locks keep out only the honest.

Yiddish Proverb