Quotes About Crime

Once I got interested in organized crime, and, specifically, Jewish organized crime, I got very interested in it. I have learned that, like my narrator Hannah, I'm a crime writer in my own peculiar way. Crime with a capital "C" is the subject that I'm stuck with - even Sway is about "crime" in a certain way. The nice thing about crime is that it enables you to deal with some big questioO

Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.

There's this old line the wise folks in Washington have that "it's not the crime, but the cover-up." But only fools believe that. It's always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable.

It's kind of like sentencing. A lot of people say that we have a heavy sentence for this crime and a light sentence for another crime, and what we ought to do is reduce the heavy sentence so it's more in line with the other. Wrong. In most cases we ought to increase the light sentence and make it compatible with the heavy sentence, and be serious about punishment because we are becoming too tolerant as a society, folks, especially of crime, in too many parts of the country.

When I started to get involved in the crime issue, people said, "it's a local issue." I said, "No, there are lots of ways the federal government can help." And the best way the federal government can help, and did in the Crime Bill, is to find programs that work around the country and help them spread.

My London constituency in Hackney has one of the highest levels of gun crime in the country. But the problem is no longer confined to inner city areas. Gun crime has spread to communities all over Britain.

If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures.

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.

There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone.

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.

Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn't create the crime.

But [your crime] will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride.

As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

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.

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

I heard some good news today, the FBI and the CIA are going to start cooperating. They are going to start working together. And if you don't know the difference between the FBI and the CIA, the FBI bungles domestic crime, the CIA bungles foreign crime.

To call it a crime against Mankind is to miss at least half its significance, it is also the punishment of a crime.

I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.

But we're going to work on education, we're going to work on - going to stop - try to stop the crime, great law enforcement officials. We're not going to try to - we're going to stop crime. But it's very important to me. But this isn't Donald Trump that divided a nation.

This country would be a better place to live in if all the resources we currently put toward criminalizing marijuana were instead spent by law enforcement on protection from real crime, as opposed to victimless crime.

If I had admitted my guilt, it would have been the same as putting my head on the chopping block - lifetime ban. Death penalty. I spent my entire life on the baseball fields of America, and I was not going to give up my profession without first seeing some hard evidence ... right or wrong, the punishment didn't fit the crime, so I denied the crime.

Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

Organized religions have all the facets of organized crime, except the compassion of organized crime.

Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

Human trafficking is a crime against humanity. We must unite our efforts to free the victims and stop this increasingly aggressive crime which threatens not only individuals but the basic values of society.

There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.

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.

We think of justice sometimes as getting what you deserve, you know  -  what crime was committed and what is the punishment for that crime. That's how a lot of the criminal justice works. But God's justice is restorative, so it's not as interested in those same questions of "What did they do wrong?" and "What is the punishment for that?" It's more about what harm was done and how do we heal that harm, and that's a much more redemptive version. So, it definitely doesn't turn a blind eye to harm, but it does say we want to heal the wounds of that.

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.

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.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

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.

Andrew..,' I shake my head, tears rolling my cheeks, '... it was always you," I whisper harshly. 'Even with Ian, I felt something was missing. I told you, that night in the field; I told you that...,' My voice trails. I smile and say, 'you are my partner in crime. I've known that for a long time.

It's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.

One last important influence I'll mention is Flannery O'Connor. In high school I shoplifted her Complete Stories. Having read "Good Country People" for class, I really just felt a home in her work. I had little guilt about the theft at the time. I sucked in my stomach and shoved the book into my pants. It's very big. I can still feel how it cut into my body in the most exciting way. Clearly, I don't feel guilt-free about this crime anymore - I wouldn't be mentioning here, looking for some absolution if I did.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.

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

I once succumbed to the fad of fasting and went for six days and nights without eating. It wasn't difficult. I was less hungry at the end of the sixth day than I was at the end of the second. Yet I know, as you know, people who would think they had committed a crime if they let their families or employees go for six days without food; but they will let them go for six days, and six weeks, and sometimes sixty years without giving them the hearty appreciation that they crave almost as much as they crave food.

If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration.

The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.

While alcohol ... continues to wreak havoc in America, supported by a $6 billion-a-year alcohol industry advertising campaign extolling the joy of inebriation, the far less harmful drug of marijuana remains illegal and continues to ruin people's lives - only if they are caught possessing and convicted of that crime.

The crime of bribery of foreign officials is an offence under the Commonwealth Criminal Code.

You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.

There are a lot of stats and a strong correlation between dropout rates and crime as well as poverty.

The idea of accountability in Vietnam, Nicaragua and now Iraq - the media never has that in its quiver. When you see time after time there is no possibility of Nuremberg [war crime trials], we're doomed to have it repeated.

How dare the smooth talkers, the clever official blabbers, open their mouths and boast of progress. . . . Here they hold jubilant peace conferences in which they talk against war. . . . But the same righteous Governments, who are so nobly, industriously active to establish the eternal peace, are preparing, by their own confession, complete annihilation for six million people, and there is nobody, except the doomed themselves, to raise his voice in protest although this is a worse crime than any war . . .