Quotes About Crime

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.

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.

Given my experience, I believe there are three compelling reasons why the death penalty should be replaced. (1) The criminal justice system makes mistakes and the possibility of executing innocent people is both inherently wrong and morally reprehensible; (2) My personal experience and crime data show the death penalty does not reduce crime; and (3) The death penalty wastes precious resources that could be best used to fight crime and solve thousands of unsolved homicides languishing in filing cabinets in understaffed police departments across the state.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.

And is it not obvious that, just as it is a crime to disturb the peace when truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when the truth is being destroyed?

I hear you reproach, "But delay was best, For their end was a crime." Oh, a crime will do As well, I reply, to serve for a test As a virtue golden through and through, Sufficient to vindicate itself And prove its worth at a moment's view! . . . . . . Let a man contend to the uttermost For his life's set prize, be it what it will! The counter our lovers staked was lost As surely as if it were lawful coin; And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost Is-the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.

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.

One of the things that did intrigue me about when I read the pilot - because I had not read the books before doing the show - was the mystery aspect of it. I didn't feel that it was just a crime-based story. It really does have that mystery element, and it felt like a throwback to other shows in the past that had a bit more of that. There was something iconic about it. The fact that it's set in Boston gave it a feeling that was different to me. So, I am definitely more of a fan of mysteries than I am of a circular crime-based genre.

Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars.

Murder is a crime. Describing Murder is not. Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is.

A crime which is the crime of many none avenge.

That it is not enough to catch a criminal and get them convicted and so on, because the victim remains with the consequences of the crime. Something needs to be done. Let's complete that process, interact with civil society about this, so that we will specify what is it that we do in the context of that Charter that would then make this positive impact on people who might have been affected by crime.

Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.

Drunkenness is not only the cause of crime, but it is crime; and if any encourage drunkenness for the sake of the profit derived from the sale of drink, they are guilty of a form of moral assassination as criminal as any that has ever been practiced by the braves of any country or of any age.

One of the biggest lies in the world is that crime doesn't pay. Of course, crime pays.

It's not a crime not to know yourself. It's not a crime to send life away. It's just a shame.

We've seen a shift where people were often initially reluctant to call things terrorism until they knew for sure. And now they start out assuming it's terrorism and then work backwards and say it may or may not have been terrorism. And it does matter tremendously because of the resources involved. If it's a crime that's seen as a disturbed individual, then local police will handle it. If it's a crime that's seen as someone who might be linked to an international terrorist group, you get the vast federal U.S. national security bureaucracy as well as tremendous political attention.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn has always had a reputation as a man who cares for women, and even a libertine . . . There is a vast difference between [that] reputation . . . and the charge which he is the object, which is a serious, very serious crime or sex crime. This is something very different.

If I dare to tear up or shed a tear, then I'm criticized for that as well! It's a horrible double standard, but quite frankly, I don't have time enough to fight that battle and fight crime. I chose to fight crime and ignore the rest. I just keep going to the best I can.

Gun laws are an attempt to nationalize the right of self-defense. Politicians perennially react to the police's abject failure to prevent crime by trying to disarm law-abiding citizens. The worse government fails to control crime, the more the politicians want to restrict individuals' rights to defend themselves. But police protection in most places is typical government work - slow, inefficient, and unreliable.

The only crime equaling inhumanity is the crime of indifference, silence, and forgetting.

What has happened here [aftermath of 9/11] is not war in its traditional sense. This is clearly a crime against humanity. War crimes are crimes which happen in war time. There is a confusion there. This is a crime against humanity because it is deliberate and intentional killing of large numbers of civilians for political or other purposes. That is not tolerable under the international systems. And it should be prosecuted pursuant to the existing laws.

I don't think anything good is happening. I think we're paying the price for it. I think while crime in general is going down, youth crime is going up. I think mental health problems of the youth are going up. You can't show causality. It's a hard stretch.

Some of the best movies made about crime are those where the crime solver can get inside the head of the serial killer, and those are the techniques we use in C.S.I.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

Crime is actually less in places where people own guns. Washington, D.C., is a case in point. It has the strictest gun laws, but who has the highest crime rate in the country? Washington, D.C.

A great read; an exciting, frightening account of organized crime today. But like all important works of nonfiction, it goes further… This book is must reading for anyone with an interest in the enduring effects of the Vietnam War, the subject of crime in our streets, and the issue of personal responsibility in a harsh, chaotic world.

Crime is only the worst example, but it is a paradigm for other Labour policy disasters. No one tells the voters that crime is falling: let them stay scared senseless.

The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods. It remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime. It is no more entitled to respect than is the flag of a pirate.

Environmental degradation, overpopulation, refugees, narcotics, terrorism, world crime movements, and organized crime are worldwide problems that don't stop at a nation's borders.

We have reached a point where the value we do add to our economy is now being outweighed by the value we are removing, not only from future generations in terms of diminished resources, but from ourselves in terms of unlivable cities, deadening jobs, deteriorating health, and rising crime. In biological terms, we have become a parasite and are devouring our host.

The lesson has already been learned with alcohol prohibition. We tried to engineer an alcohol-free society and ended up with huge criminal enterprises, government corruption, children lured into organized crime and random violence that took the lives of countless innocent people.

Prosecutors must reveal the dirty little secret they too often share only among themselves: The death penalty actually hinders the fight against crime.

Had drugs been decriminalized, crack would never have been invented and there would today be fewer addicts... The ghettos would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man's lands... Colombia, Bolivia and Peru would not be suffering from narco-terror, and we would not be distorting our foreign policy because of it.

Every 13 seconds in America someone uses a gun - not to kill someone, but to stop a crime.

An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth; or it is an error: it can never be a crime or a virtue.

Trying to conceal a crime is like burying a seed in the ground.

The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.

Money comes to Switzerland through three illegal sources: tax evasion in other developed countries, the blood money of dictators and other rulers in the Third World and organized crime.

When a secretary of state illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can't see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence, I know that corruption has reached a level like never, ever before in America!

Good evening. A President who lied us into a war and, in so doing, needlessly killed 3,584 of our family and friends and neighbors; a President whose administration initially tried to destroy the first man to nail that lie; a President whose henchmen then ruined the career of the intelligence asset that was his wife when intelligence assets were never more essential to the viability of the Republic; a President like that has tonight freed from the prospect of prison the only man ever to come to trial for one of the component felonies in what may be the greatest crime of this young century.

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.

Honesty is the best policy in international relations, interpersonal relations, labor, business, education, family and crime control because truth is the only thing that works and the only foundation on which lasting relations can build.

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

If my people are wiped out you must destroy all photographs of us, because future generations will look at our photographs and be too ashamed at such a crime against humanity.