Crime Quotes

The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

Elias Canetti

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

Alfred Tennyson

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Evelyn Waugh

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

Stephen King

A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange.... Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship.

Aristotle

The experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans. There is almost nothing we understand better or react to more readily or with quicker intelligence. In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects Americanism itself.

Robert Warshow

Gamesters and highwaymen are generally very good to their whores, but they are very devils to their wives.

John Gay

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

George Bernard Shaw

It is no secret that organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Woody Allen

Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.

Horace

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

George Bernard Shaw

There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

Emile Durkheim

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Ray Bradbury

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We may live without friends; we may live without books. But civilized men cannot live without cooks.

Owen Meredith

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

Havelock Ellis

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Before a thunderstorm there is a build-up of tension which is only relieved by the explosive force of thunder and lightning. In human affairs there must be a clear distinction between the penalties for small and great crimes. Retribution for wrongdoing must be swiftly and surely applied if greater problems are to be prevented.

I Ching