Top 100 Quotes About Crime
#1. In war, as in politics, no evil - even if it is permissible under the rules - is excusable unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything beyond that is a crime.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#2. Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
Yiyun Li
#3. It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.
Mark Billingham
#4. Organized crime constitutes nothing less than a guerilla war against society.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#5. The crime of a bad example is the same whether men follow it or not, because he that gives bad example to others, does what in him lies to draw them into sin; and if they do not follow it, that is no mitigation of his fault.
John Tillotson
#6. Crime is rampant. We even steal away from responsibility.
Andre Brie
#7. In a world of cruelty, sympathy is a crime, and in a world of lies, truth is blasphemy.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#8. Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.
David Mitchell
#9. Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
Pat Conroy
#10. People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.
Denise Mina
#11. What's been building since the 1980's is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family. That's what will last after this flurry on family values.
Stephanie Coontz
#12. The most common place crime is often the most mysterious, because it presents no new or specific features from which deductions may be drawn
Arthur Conan Doyle
#13. America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.
Malcolm X
#14. The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.
George Pelecanos
#15. Drugs are available to those who want them. And where are those profits going? Into organized crime, [to criminals] who spend their profits on the destruction of whole societies.
Sam Branson
#17. Jesus's titulus reads KING OF THE JEWS. His crime: striving for kingly rule; sedition. And so, like every bandit and revolutionary, every rabble-rousing zealot and apocalyptic prophet who came before or after him -
Reza Aslan
#18. Don't fear failure. - Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
Bruce Lee
#19. Sisters in Crime now has more than 4,000 members worldwide.
Sara Paretsky
#21. Make the mistakes of youth is no crime, but not to learn from them is.
Jim Butcher
#22. Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special.
Carl Hiaasen
#23. When you go to your local police officer, your police chief in the town you live in, big or small, he will tell you the vast majority of the weapons recovered at a crime scene are either stolen weapons, and/or they have been 'lost' or stolen.
Joe Biden
#24. That we could live in a country with no rules for the rich, no rights for the poor, and no middle class to speak of, is wrong; it's a crime against the next generation and we've got to do something about it.
Van Jones
#25. Many of us are under the delusion that the police exist solely to deal with crime and keep us safe. That is to ignore the major focus of many of today's top cops on managing reputation - both of their force and, by default, their careers.
Heather Brooke
#26. Armed and law-abiding citizens are a greater deterrent to violent crime than 1,000 laws passed by Congress.
Rick Perry
#27. Rather than following through on the proven crime and violence prevention techniques that work, we are back to tough-talking sound byte policies that have been proven to not only fail to reduce crime but actually increase crime, waste taxpayers' money and discriminate against minorities.
Bobby Scott
#28. Lucky are you, reader, if you happen not to be of that sex to whom it is forbidden all good things; to whom liberty is denied; to whom almost all virtues are denied; lucky are you if you are one of those who can be wise without its being a crime.
Marie De Gournay
#29. Belson came into the apartment with some crime-scene people and two homicide detectives.
"This guy," Charlie said, and looked at his notebook, "Spenser. He was impersonating a police officer."
Belson glanced at him. "We all thought that," Belson said, "when he was a cop.
Robert B. Parker
#30. Crime, after all, can be a way of establishing identity or acquiring security - at least the magistrate addresses you by name.
Ariana Franklin
#31. Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.
David R. Brower
#32. As Vishous seemed to find a partner in surly crime with Rhamp, Qhuinn found himself staring at the brother. For a lot of reasons. One,
J.R. Ward
#33. Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.
Thomas Francis Meagher
#35. Zimbabwe has far fewer tourists than South Africa or Kenya, and there's less crime as well.
Nicholas Kristof
#36. The United States and Mexico are trapped - economically, culturally, politically and because of drug crime - in the same continent.
Barry McCaffrey
#37. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
Emile Durkheim
#38. The Home Office culture was one of being just above the problem, of hovering just out of reach of knowing what was going on on the ground, whether it was crime or immigration.
David Blunkett
#39. Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.
Marquis De Sade
#40. Sometimes the hardest thing about committing the perfect crime can be keeping your genius to yourself.
Sarah Lacy
#41. When you're smart on crime, you start off by recognizing that both the victim, first of all, the victim, but also the person who did the crime are both human.
Benjamin Jealous
#42. What is the motive to the secret ballot? This, and only this: Like other confederates in crime, those who use it are not friends, but enemies; and they are afraid to be known, and to have their individual doings known, even to each other.
Lysander Spooner
#43. David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence - it is a crime against humanity after all.
Margo Kingston
#44. When Lila was born, "I felt like, now I've got a partner in crime".
Kate Moss
#45. Pity . . . is more properly bestowed in cases of involuntary suffering than of crime and offences committed voluntarily and with malice aforethought.
Antiphon
#46. Nothing is absolutely unjust. There is no real equity, no total grandeur, no pure vice, no absolute crime.
Julien Offray De La Mettrie
#47. A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around.
Dan Gilroy
#48. Nothing is more devastating to a community than out-of-control crime.
Alan Autry
#49. As anyone who regularly reads newspapers or true-crime books knows, a significant percentage of violent crime, from kidnappings to shooting sprees, is the result of the frustrated sexual impulses and desires of males. By socializing guys like Sasha, Mystery and I were making the world a safer place.
Neil Strauss
#50. Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
James Ellroy
#51. The strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime - it even presupposes it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#52. I just remember how cool and exciting and crazy it seemed when Marvel was giving this new 'Ultimate Spider-Man' title to this crime writer Brian Michael Bendis who had never really done any superhero stuff before.
Jason Aaron
#53. 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.
P.D. Ouspensky
#54. Violent crime rates fell steadily from 1993 to 2002, and this nearly coincides with the establishment of the community policing program known as the COPS program under the Clinton administration.
Alan Mollohan
#55. You want a crime to torture yourself for, try cowardice. The only sin that ever mattered a shit is the shame that put us all here. Fuck, I didn't give you that power just so you could judge yourselves. I gave you the power so you could judge God.
Hal Duncan
#56. I love Amy Adams. She is wonderful. Evan Rachel Wood is a blast. I am also really excited about Ari Graynor from 'Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist' and 'American Crime.' I think it is an exciting time for young women in this industry. I am excited to make my own path.
Candice Accola
#58. 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.
John Stuart Mill
#59. There's definitely a fascination with crime stories and stories of characters acting out against authority.
Joel Edgerton
#60. When you teach your students that it's "economically rational" to commit crimes where the fines for misconduct are lower than the expected return on the crime, you instill a professional ethic that has no room for morals.
Cory Doctorow
#61. To make crime unprofitable, let the government run it.
Irene Peter
#62. The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.
Mignon McLaughlin
#63. When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives.
Richard House
#64. I don't think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn't becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it's very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.'
Douglas Adams
#65. Science, as a rule beneficent, has given birth to potentialities of crime which exceed the dreams of oriental romance.
Robert Barr
#66. Let's go. I don't want to keep you from the things you have to do ... like plan the next crime wave with your biker gang."
"Sure. And you don't want to miss your nail appointment."
I cocked my head. "That's tomorrow.
Sophie Jordan
#67. My father used to always say to me that, you know, if a guy goes out to steal a loaf of bread to feed his family, they'll give him 10 years, but a guy can do white-collar crime and steal the money of thousands and he'll get probation and a slap on the wrist.
Jesse Ventura
#68. To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other.
Karl Shapiro
#69. In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.
Sigmund Freud
#70. Yet following the handgun confiscation in England, crimes committed with handguns jumped nearly 40% from 1999 to 2000. Violent crime in England now surpasses the US violent crime rate.
Charl Van Wyk
#71. Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.
William Landay
#72. The crime should be punished no matter whether poverty or wealth caused it to occur, because the crime is wrong.
Ernest Van Den Haag
#73. The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.
Edmund White
#74. In many respects I have gone out of my way to avoid the usual approach adopted in crime novels. I have used some techniques that are normally outlawed - the presentation of Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, is based exclusively on the personal case study made by Lisbeth Salander.
Stieg Larsson
#75. A criminal is twice a criminal when he adds hypocrisy to his crime.
Marie Corelli
#76. He adored force and hated weakness. It is the crime of female natures.
Francois Mauriac
#77. That every man, no matter what his color or race or creed might be, and no matter what the crime that he is charged with, each man in those circumstances is entitled to the fairest treatment that anybody can possibly give him.
Gilbert King
#78. Michelle had great admiration for criminals and crime, though only from a distance.
Michelle Tea
#79. Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Ernest Hemingway,
#80. It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime.
William J. Brennan
#81. Consideration of any kind are a crime against the German people and the soldier at the front.
Wilhelm Keitel
#82. All is extremely genteel; and there is almost as much repose as in the golden saloons of the contiguous palaces. At any rate, if there be as much vice, there is as little crime.
Isaac D'Israeli
#83. Revenge is solely about passion. Rage. Fury. Vengeance, on the other hand, is about retribution for a crime done against oneself.
Pete Kahle
#85. Call me an over anxious, middle-class mum, but my eight-and-a-half-year old son looks very much, to me, like he's headed for a life of crime.
Arabella Weir
#86. The fact is, in the minds of many, Trayvon Martin received the appropriate punishment for a true crime: He was black, male and dared to walk outside. In life, young Trayvon was just a teenager; in death, he has been transformed into a scary, lurking, suspicious, prone-to-violence spook.
Henry Rollins
#87. A traitor commits his crime but once. The rest/is retribution.
Marie Howe
#88. I've always hated criminals and crime. Life is hard enough without someone walking into your life on purpose and making it worse.
Pauley Perrette
#89. I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.
Shirley Jackson
#91. I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.
Delmore Schwartz
#92. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond these words.
Joseph Conrad
#93. They know their crime," she said. "They know their shame.
Alethea Kontis
#96. What Mexico City cannot do and my country cannot do is to allow us to be intimidated, the authorities to be intimidated, by organized crime.
Enrique Pena Nieto
#97. Alas! for that accursed time They bore thee o'er the billow, From love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow! From me, and from our misty clime, Where weeps the silver willow!
Edgar Allan Poe
#98. If we are tough on crime and on terrorism, as Labour is, then I think Britain will be safer under Labour
Peter Hain
#99. The truth is that you have to fight your way through brutal, ugly realities in order to find that moment of clarity, that one slant of light or shift in emotion that yields unexpected art. That's just as true for life as it is for crime scene photography.
Maggie Ybarra
#100. Between 1999 and 2009, the people of Baltimore achieved the greatest reduction in crime of America's largest cities.
Martin O'Malley
