Top 100 Quotes About Crime And Punishment
#1. I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.
Isaac Hempstead-Wright
#2. No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.
Paul Gallico
#3. It is not a question of crime and punishment
it is problem and solution.
Rohinton Mistry
#4. 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
#5. I read 'Crime and Punishment' years ago and don't recall the details of it, but I do retain a strong sense of the creeping paranoia and panic.
Arthur Smith
#6. A big moment for me was when I did a play that was a new adaptation of Dostojevskij's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I played Raskolnikov. It was actually the first thing I did when I got out of acting school.
Joel Kinnaman
#7. He found all the people he met repulsive - their faces, their manner of walking, their movements were repulsive to him. He reflected that if anyone had said anything to him he would quite simply have spat at that person, or bitten him ... - Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#8. Even Mademoiselle Neubahr can't make me believe in hell. It doesn't seem a very - witty - solution of the crime-and-punishment situation, does it?
Frances Noyes Hart
#9. Crime and punishment can be summed up in two classifications: there are bad people and there are people who get into bad situations. The lines for liberation and rehabilitation should first begin with the people who get into bad situations.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
#10. I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.
Ron Rash
#11. My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.
Janet Fitch
#12. The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days ... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'
Paul Auster
#13. In fact, whenever I read something as complicated as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and think about his having written it in longhand, I am not merely awed - the thought gives me a headache.
Thomas B. Sawyer
#14. A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.
Boris Pasternak
#15. I got on a Dostoyevsky kick right after college. I started with 'Crime and Punishment,' went on to 'The Possessed' and then 'The Brothers Karamazov' and 'The Idiot.'
Charlie Trotter
#16. " You think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth." --Crime and punishment, F. Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#17. It's great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity.
Russell Smith
#18. The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.
Michelle Alexander
#19. I'm sure if the punishment fits the crime, or is more severe, you're going to start stamping out a lot of things that are going on in football.
Alan Curbishley
#20. The murder that is depicted as a horrible crime is repeated in cold blood, remorselessly.
Cesare Beccaria
#21. A strange idea was pecking at his brain like a chicken in the egg, and very, very much absorbed him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#22. I don't consider myself above the law, I consider myself above the principles.
~ Aarush Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
#23. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.
Arundhati Roy
#24. Obviously, people who commit crimes should be punished. Even people who steal socks and 'Snow White' videos should probably do time if they have priors, especially serious priors. But the punishment has to fit the crime, and the standard has to be the same for everyone.
Matt Taibbi
#25. My argument is not that I shouldn't have been punished, but that the punishment didn't fit the crime.
Kevin Mitnick
#26. We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#27. Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.
Barry Unsworth
#28. I wanted to show that crime doesn't pay. If you are saved and accept the Lord, you cannot use that as an excuse to avoid punishment.
Robert Duvall
#29. The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#30. It's actually a smarter crime because imagine if you rob a bank, or you're dealing drugs. If you get caught you're going to spend a lot of time in custody. But with hacking, it's much easier to commit the crime and the risk of punishment is slim to none.
Kevin Mitnick
#31. The guilty is he who meditates a crime; the punishment is his who lays the plot.
Vittorio Alfieri
#32. Nothing so upholds the laws as the punishment of persons whose rank is as great as their crime.
Cardinal Richelieu
#33. Vice may triumph for a time, crime may flaunt its victories in the face of honest toilers, but in the end the law will follow the wrong-doer to a bitter fate, and dishonor and punishment will be the portion of those who sin.
Allan Pinkerton
#34. I guess having one hundred and four condoms full of heroin in your guts and the thought of a firing squad in your head make will make most things seem insignificant.
S.A. Tawks
#35. It's a free country." Inmates once bought this. That's why they're inmates.
Brian Spellman
#36. but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.
Clarice Lispector
#37. Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.
Clint Eastwood
#38. Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.
Michelle Alexander
#39. There is no crime greater, or more worthy of punishment, than being strange and frightened among the strange and frightened; except assimilation to the end of becoming strange and frightened, but apart from ones own real self.
Israel Horovitz
#40. Some heinous crimes justify the ultimate punishment.
Barack Obama
#41. The method of electrocution would be much better than the old method of hanging.
Meldrim Thomson Jr.
#42. Tattoos tell stories of crime and passion, punishment and regret. They express an outlaw, antiauthoritarian point of view and communicate a romantic solidarity among society's outcasts.
Douglas Kent Hall
#43. Don't you believe that the punishment should fit the crime? Isn't that what justice is? Letely, though, I wonder if we've gotten more into vengenance than justice.
Whoopi Goldberg
#44. The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
H.L. Mencken
#46. The criminal left belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary.
Spiro T. Agnew
#47. Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Alcee Hastings
#48. It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
Michel Foucault
#49. Every transgression and disobedience receives a just recompense of reward, except with those who truly love themselves.
Auliq Ice
#50. Countries and states which have capital punishment have a much higher rate of murder and crime than countries that do not, so that makes sense to me, and the moral question - I struggle with it morally.
Charlize Theron
#51. And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?
Kahlil Gibran
#52. 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
#53. My object all sublime I shall achieve in time- To let the punishment fit the crime- The punishment fit the crime.
W.S. Gilbert
#54. The law is that you
must live
in the house you have built.
The law is absurd: it is
written down nowhere.
You are uncertain what crime
is, though each life writhing to
elude what it has made
feels like punishment.
Frank Bidart
#55. To call it a crime against Mankind is to miss at least half its significance, it is also the punishment of a crime.
Frederic Manning
#56. Let someone who was not from among the convicts try reproaching a prisoner for his crime and abusing him (though it's not in the Russian spirit to reproach a criminal)
there would be no end of cursing.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#57. If the same punishment is prescribed for two crimes that injure society in different degrees, then men will face no stronger deterrent from committing the greater crime if they find it in their advantage to do so.
Cesare Beccaria
#58. I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder ... We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil, and destroy it.
Susan B. Anthony
#59. The real truth is, the number of convicts is too overwhelming for the means of proper and effectual punishment. I despair of any remedy but that which I wish I could hope for - a great reduction in the amount of crime.
Robert Peel
#61. Punishment is but legalized crime. In a society built on prevention, rather than retaliation, there would be very little crime. The few exceptions will be treated medically, as of unsound mind and body.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#62. In order that punishment should not be an act of violence perpetrated by one or many upon a private citizen, it is essential that it should be public, speedy, necessary, the minimum possible in the given circumstances, proportionate to the crime, and determined by the law.
Cesare Beccaria
#63. The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime
for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.
Marquis De Sade
#64. One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem on others.
Juvenal
#65. 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.
Yakov Smirnoff
#66. The candle-end had long been burning out in the bent candlestick, casting a dim light in this destitute room upon the murderer and the harlot strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#67. The man that does not fear punishment, little regards crime.
Norm MacDonald
#68. Punishment. - A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does. The
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.
Dimitri A. Bogazianos
#70. I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#71. We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.
Potter Stewart
#72. The punishment should fit the crime and if a doctor or drug company does harm knowingly or negligently to a patient they should be compensated to make them whole.
Corrine Brown
#73. For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes.
Cesare Beccaria
#75. Crime? What crime? ... My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman ... and you call that a crime?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#76. I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.
George Orwell
#77. If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.
Samuel Johnson
#78. Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?
Marquis De Sade
#79. The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#80. ( ... )man holds the remedy in his own hands, and lets everything go its own way, simply through cowardice- that is an axiom.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#81. If you are sentenced to torture for a crime, yes, that is a cruel punishment. But the mere fact that somebody is tortured is - is unlawful under - under our statutes, but the Constitution happens not to address it, just as it does not address a lot of other horrible things.
Antonin Scalia
#82. The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.
Anthony Burgess
#83. If a deadly snake slithering around in a pre-school bit a child, would you box it up for a month as punishment, and then release it to prey upon the children once again?
Edward M. Wolfe
#84. Man is a creature who gets used to everything, and that, I think, is the best definition of him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#85. The work of eradicating crimes is not by making punishment familiar, but formidable.
Oliver Goldsmith
#87. We all have our particular preferences. Mine is gentle sex, the kind in which a man takes forever before he touches you down there. But most people are so guilty about sex that they want the crime and the punishment built in.
Erica Jong
#88. The serial murderer often seeks the very form of capital punishment that is being held over his head as a deterrent.
Joel Norris
#89. People also felt that a great crime had been committed, yet there was not going to be a great punishment.
Bethany McLean
#90. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime. In
Michelle Alexander
#91. As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.
Ron Chernow
#92. Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.
Jane Hirshfield
#93. Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
John Ruskin
#94. A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.
Oscar Wilde
#95. Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.
Elizabeth Fry
#96. This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.
William Landay
#97. Build the prisons and they will commit the crimes.
Brian Spellman
#98. To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#99. The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other. They are worse than ever when, at the termination of their punishment, they return to society.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#100. The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it.
Emil Fackenheim
