37 Intriguing Quotes About Crime

In a world often marked by its complexity and nuance, crime remains a subject that captivates, mystifies, and challenges us in equal measure. Whether viewed through the lens of a gripping thriller novel or the stark reality of news headlines, crime provokes a myriad of emotions and reflections. This intrigue has inspired writers, thinkers, and creatives throughout history to ponder its nature, its causes, and its impact on society. In this collection, we explore 37 thought-provoking quotes that delve into the enigmatic world of crime. From the philosophical musings of great minds to the chilling insights of crime fiction, these quotes offer a unique glimpse into the darker corners of human experience. Join us as we unravel these words, each one offering a perspective that compels us to reflect on justice, morality, and the human condition.

1. “There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” - Ayn Rand

2. “Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

3. “A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.” - Victor Hugo

4. “Vice may triumph for a time, crime may flaunt its victories in the face of honest toilers, but in the end the law will follow the wrong-doer to a bitter fate, and dishonor and punishment will be the portion of those who sin.” - Allan Pinkerton

5. “Stealing to eat ain’t criminal—stealing to be rich is.” - Andrew Vachss

6. “While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it.While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” - Eugene Debs

7. “Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper amd never had a break since. That's what I'd like. You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don't run our country that way.” - Raymond Chandler

8. “The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?” - Arthur Conan Doyle

9. “Most investigators don't even know what the word means. You stop the cops from using informants and the only crimes they'd ever solve would be those by deranged postal workers who come to work once too often.” - Andrew Vachss

10. “Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see clearly?” - Jodi Picoult

11. “A fish might more easily live on the apex of a rock than a man accustomed to crime live a life of virtue. (“The Story of Prince Barkiarokh”)” - William Beckford

12. “one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.” - Patricia Highsmith

13. “I refer to what is called mysterium iniquitatis, meaning, as I see it, that a crime in the final analysis remains inexplicable inasmuch as it cannot be fully traced back to biological, psychological and/or sociological factors. Totally explaining one’s crime would be tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being but a machine to be repaired. Even criminals themselves abhor this treatment and prefer to be held responsible for their deeds. From a convict serving his sentence in an Illinois penitentiary I received a letter in which he deplored that 'the criminal never has a chance to explain himself. He is offered a variety of excuses to choose from. Society is blamed and in many instances the blame is put on the victim.” - Viktor E. Frankl

14. “In sum," Midlife said, giving the room his best you-the-jury baritone, "Our defense will be...?" He looked to Matt for the answer/"Blame the other guy," Matt said."Which other guy?""Yes.""Huh?""We blame whoever we can," Matt said. "The CFO, the COO, the C Choose-Your-Favorite-Two-Letter-Combination, the accounting firm, the banks, the board, the lower-level employees. We claim some of them are crooks. We claim some of them made honest mistakes that steamrolled.""Isn't that contradictory?" Midlife asked, folding his hands and lowering his eyebrows. "Claiming both malice and mistakes?" He stopped, looked up, smiled, nodded. Malice and mistakes. Midlife liked the way that sounded."We're looking to confuse," Matt said. "You blame enough people, nothing sticks. The jury end up knowing something went wrong but you don't know where to place the blame. We throw facts and figures at them. We bring up every possible mistake, every uncrossed t and dotted i. We act like discrepancy is a huge deal, even if it's not. We are skeptical of EVERYONE.” - Harlan Coben

15. “You cannot have a society of angels except in heaven” - Michela Wrong

16. “Whenever Elliot Norther’s wife was nervous she baked. With the murder of Harriet Mason, her husband’s close colleague at the Faculty, she had been unable to resist a couple of Victoria sponges. During the frenzied press speculation about the identity of the murderer, a Dundee cake had appeared, followed swiftly by a Battenberg and a Lemon Drizzle. Since news of the Wildencrust murder broke, the kitchen, dining room and study had come to resemble the storerooms of an industrial bakery, every surface heaving with the weight of sponge and cream. Yesterday, having at last been overwhelmed by the fear and rumour that swept the town, she had taken herself off to her mother’s house in Hampstead, leaving her husband to soldier on alone. When he had last seen his wife, Elliot Norther noticed that she had been putting the finishing touches to an impressive, triple-tiered wedding cake, beating a batch of royal icing into a sickly paste.” - Robert Clear

17. “There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.” - Margery Allingham

18. “[Stieg] was describing Sweden the way it was and the way he saw the country: the scandals, the oppression of women, the friends he cherished and wished to honor.” - Eva Gabrielsson

19. “We've got our heads pulled low inside of our hooded sweatshirts and our eyes are shifty. We look exactly like you'd expect someone to look if they were minutes away from committing a major crime.” - Kendare Blake

20. “Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?” - Christopher Fowler

21. “Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they're mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.” - Philippe Claudel

22. “I do not know whether it came from his own innate depravity or from the promptings of his master, but he was rude enough to set a dog at me. Neither dog nor man liked the look of my stick, however, and the matter fell through. Relations were strained after that, and further inquiries out of the question.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

23. “These kids are already hard. They don't need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They've lost that. That's what we need to give back to them.” - Edward Humes

24. “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

25. “He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.” - Barry N. Malzberg

26. “...chance is sometimes a wonderful accomplice in crime.” - Émile Gaboriau

27. “Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...” - Martin Hopkins

28. “Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.” - Emile Durkheim

29. “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” - Mario Puzo

30. “The reflex of fear was soon replaced with another, more useful emotion.Rage.” - Tara Moss

31. “Eve: "Where's Mister Scary?"Roarke: "Summerset has the night off."Eve: "You mean the house is Summerset-free? Damn shame we have to waste it with work.” - J.D. Robb

32. “It’s…The only way I can get on with my life is by forgetting what went on before. Dave used to tell me that I didn’t have control over what the bastard of my father did to me, and that he’d been punished for it, and I might as well concentrate on the rest of my life, because over that…I had some control and I could decide what to do. I could change it over; I could become anything I wanted if I just tried hard enough.” - Olga Núñez Miret

33. “You must have been working very hard here, with so few distractions.”Mary’s eyes darkened and she looked away.“Not quite as much as I hoped for. At times the loneliness and the unanswered questions can get overwhelming, like very loud voices echoing inside my head, just asking ‘why’ ‘who’ and making me think about my wasted life.” - Olga Núñez Miret

34. “Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts on others- being forced to make impossible "choices"- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks- being forced to hurt othersRitual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.” - Laurie Matthew

35. “In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions.” - Laurie Matthew

36. “No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has developed in dealing with the criminal. It proclaims his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if he does not live up to it.” - Frank Tannenbaum

37. “It is so good that you can love someone for how long you want and no one can arrest you for that crime.” - M.F. Moonzajer