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.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they'll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.

I came to know that in many ways it was a crime to be Filipino in California .... I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America.

The question eventually must be raised: Is it a criminal offense to take the name of the Lord in vain? When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime (Ex. 21:17). The son or daughter is under the lawful jurisdiction of the family. The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death. Clearly, cursing God (blasphemy) is a comparable crime, and is therefore a capital crime (Lev. 24:16).

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.

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

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

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.

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.

In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified.... All three were crucified for the same crime-the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

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

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.

Black crime rates fell more steeply than white crime rates, and now black incarceration is falling more steeply than white incarceration.

War, even in the best state of an army, with all the alleviations of courtesy and honor, with all the correctives of morality and religion, is nevertheless so great an evil, that to engage in it without a clear necessity is a crime of the blackest dye. When the necessity is clear, it then becomes a crime to shrink from it.

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

What clever man has ever needed to commit a crime? Crime is the last resort of political half-wits.

To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.

People must realize that a crime motivated by racial or ethnic prejudice against one group is a crime against all of us.

Corporate crime kills far more people and costs taxpayers far more money than street crime.

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.

It's harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner.

Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

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 solving of almost every crime mystery depends on something which seems, at first glance, to bear no relation whatever to the original crime.

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.

Perhaps this is how girls fall -- not in some crime of enchantment at the hands of a wicked ne'er-do-well, a grand before and after in which they are innocent victims who have no say in the matter. Perhaps they simply are kissed and want to kiss back. Perhaps they even kiss first. And why should they not?

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.

A news junkie, I read, daily, the 'Times/Sunday Times,' the 'Guardian/Observer,' 'Mail,' and the 'Argus' - both to keep up with crime in Brighton, where I set my novels, and because I think it is vital to support local papers - they provide a unique accountability for councils, emergency services and so much else, and are dangerously undervalued.

It takes a long, hard effort and sustained determination to reduce crime. We will stay the course and we are confident that the numbers will continue to go down.

The fight for free space-for wilderness and for public space-must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.

It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.

How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

You need me, just whistle," he said as he arranged his ball cap over his eyes against the sun leaking through the frost-emptied branches. "You're not coming?" Lifting the brim of his cap, he eyed me, "You want me to?" he asked blandly. "Not really, no." He dropped the brim and laced his hands over his middle. "Then why are you bitching? It's a crime scene, not a grocery store.

Dishonor waits on perfidy. A man should blush to think a falsehood; it is the crime of cowards.

But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.

We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.

Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results.

All contempt for the sexual life, all denigration under the concept 'impure" is the essential crime against Life- against the Holy Spirit of Life".

I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.

Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric?

Behind every fortune there is a crime.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals?

The crime of ingratitude has not yet stained, and I trust never will stain, our national character. You are considered by them as not only having rendered important service in our own revolution, but as being, on a more extended scale, the friend of human rights, and able advocate of public liberty. To the welfare of Thomas Paine, the Americas are not, nor can they be, indifferent.