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.

The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.

Sixty million people died in the Second World War. World War II was a gigantic crime. We condemn it all. We are against bloodshed, regardless of whether a crime was committed against a Muslim or against a Christian or a Jew. But the question is: Why among these 60 million victims are only the Jews the center of attention?

The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.

When I started writing Tales of the City I was one year away from being a mental illness. It wasn't until 1975 that the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses - and in many states, including the state of North Carolina where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. An arrestable crime. It still is, in many parts of the world.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

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.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

The only crime, the only crime is to take a life. There is nothing else.' 'And that's why you don't fight,'I say. She turns to me sharply. 'To preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

Crime to many is not crime but simply a way of life. If laws are inconvenient, ignore them, they dont apply to you.

Violent crime is a solved problem - all they have to do is repeal the laws that keep those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women from arming themselves, and violent crime evaporates like dry ice on a hot summer day.

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

I never thought I was cut out for a life of crime. I even felt guilty when I accidentally stole a Subbuteo catalogue, thinking it was free. But everyone has an inner rebel, and mine has finally found a natural outlet. My crime of choice is that, with a heart as cold as ice and no care for what society thinks, I steal wireless computer network time.

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.

A crime is a crime irrespective of the birth marks of the criminal.

So the first task of a police force is not to fight crime and enforce the law. It is to establish legitimacy with the law-abiding citizenry and then fight crime and enforce the law.

But the good news, the crime rate is down. Isn't that amazing? Less banks are being robbed. Well, sure. A, there's less banks. B, the banks don't have any money left. And C, nobody's got gas money for the getaway car. So, right there, crime is down!

In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.

No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction. Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of this weapon in crime than ever before.

Last September 16th, I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, "Go back to your own country," and I was laughing so hard because it wasn't so much a hate crime as a crime of irony.

Because crime stories reveal an aspect of our personality that everybody has, but which we normally keep very deeply hidden. We like to talk about the good sides of ourselves. We don't like to talk about our hatreds, our distrusts of one another, our secrets, but crime stories drag those things to the surface and consequently they fascinate people and always have throughout all history.

Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.

I had this whole issue of doing a crime film in the 2010s. The genre's been mined very, very heavily. Post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino, post-Guy Ritchie, what do you do? I wasn't attracted to pulp so much as all of a sudden I had a pulp problem. I had to find a way to make this interesting, because there's a lot of crime films that come out on VOD every week, and a number of these star Nicolas Cage.

The crime of liberation theology was that it takes the Gospels seriously. That's unacceptable. The Gospels are radical pacifist material, if you take a look at them . . . Liberation theology, in Brazil particularly, brought the actual Gospel to peasants. They said, let's read what the Gospels say, and try to act on the principles they describe. That was the major crime that set off the Reagan wars of terror.

When the legislation that passed in the farm bill that says that it’s a federal crime to watch animals fight or to induce someone else to watch an animal fight but it’s not a federal crime to induce somebody to watch people fighting, there’s something wrong with the priorities of people that think like that.

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.

Certain readers will read my book not because they are interested in Iraq, but because they read crime fiction. I did want to get beyond just speaking to other Middle East scholars, so I'm happy about that. But this was, nonetheless, a novel I wish I got to read in Arabic and translate.

We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.

Enforcement priorities developed by my administration are not affected by this ruling. This means that the people who might have benefited from the expanded deferred action policies, long-term residents raising children who are Americans or legal residents, they will remain low priorities for enforcement, as long as you have not committed a crime, our limited immigration enforcement resources are not focused on you.

I don't have personal experience and knowledge about anything but theater. I've been tutored very well on the subject, but ultimately I'm going back to the rules of drama. There are genres that I like as an audience member that I can't write as a writer. I can't write crime, and I like a good thriller as much as anybody.

And for any victim of a violent crime, when you actually get to go in and realize and see their faces and know that they can't hurt you any more, there is no feeling like that. It finally frees you from a lot of demons.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz accused Republicans of trying to make it a crime to be an illegal alien. Democrats see a conspiracy plot. First Republicans want to say that illegal aliens are illegal, next they're going to want to take away their voting rights.

Middle class jobs prevent crime and violence.

They [NYPD] tell you how you can act and what you can do your whole entire life. But they always stayed out of it. I did a little here and there for the police department as far as a crime scene that might have occult overtones - they would call me and I'd look into it. But it was usually minor little things.

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

Religion must be used in furthering great works of justice and reform. It must be used to establish right relations between different groups of men, and thus to make a reality of brotherhood. It must be used to abolish poverty, the breeding ground of all misery and crime, by distributing equably among men the abundance of the soil. And it must be used to get rid of war and to establish enduring peace. Here is the supreme test of the effectiveness of religion.

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.

Your mother all but accused me of something that is, among my kind, the highest crime a man can commit. There is no trial, only punishment, because it is considered better to let an innocent man die than let a guilty one live." (Page 79.)

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.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Block Watch, Crime Watch, we have hundreds of thousands of Americans, every day and night, risking their lives, going out for no pay as volunteers, protecting Americans like all of you and not asking anything in return. And the other day I'm speaking in a high school in New Jersey and the youngsters go, oh, you're just like Zimmerman.

We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

I have thought about this issue of abortion time and again. It is not an easy issue for most people. I came to believe over the years that a woman should be able to make this agonizing decision with her doctor and her family and her conscience, and that we should be very careful that we don't make that decision a crime except in the most extreme circumstances.

If Creation were a crime, would not God be the prime suspect?

Undoubtedly the war with Iraq was a tragedy. I think it was also a crime.