79 Thought-Provoking Crime Quotes

In the intricate web of crime and justice, words hold a unique power to captivate, challenge, and inspire reflection. Crime, in its many forms, has long captured the imagination of writers, thinkers, and storytellers, prompting them to explore the darker facets of human nature. Through their insights, we gain perspectives that provoke thought, spark curiosity, and invite introspection. In this curated collection, we've gathered 79 thought-provoking crime quotes that delve into the complexities of right and wrong, the moral ambiguities of justice, and the profound impact of crime on both individuals and societies. Allow these words to guide you through a journey of contemplation, as they shed light on the shadows of our shared human experience.

1. “Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.” - Neal Stephenson

2. “Good. Illegal is always faster.” - Eoin Colfer

3. “When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.” - Nelson Mandela

4. “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

5. “It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy.” - Scott Turow

6. “Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries.” - Lemony Snicket

7. “Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man.” - James Ellroy

8. “I want to kill this degenerate bastard brother of yours. But I am not selfish, I do not want to deprive you of that honor.” - William Balsamo

9. “Man is born violent but is kept in check by the people around him. If he nevertheless manages to throw off his fetters, he can count on applause, for everyone recognizes himself in him. Deeply ingrained, nay, buried dreams come true. The unlimited radiates its magic even upon crime, which, not coincidentally, is the main source of entertainment in Eumeswil. I, as an anarch, not uninterested but disinterested, can understand that. Freedom has a wide range and more facets than a diamond.” - Ernst Jünger

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

11. “- Escute mais isso. Por outro lado, forças jovens, frescas, sucumbem em vão por falta de apoio, e isso aos milhares, e isso em toda parte! Cem, mil boas ações e iniciativas que poderiam ser implementadas e reparadas com o dinheiro da velha, destinado a um mosteiro! Centenas, talvez milhares de existências encaminhadas; dezenas de famílias salvas da miséria, da desagregação, da morte, da depravação, das doenças venéreas - e tudo isso com o dinheiro dela. Mate-a e tome-lhe o dinheiro, para com sua ajuda dedicar-se depois a servir toda a humanidade e a uma causa comum: o que você acha, esse crime ínfimo não seria atenuado por milhares de boas ações? Por uma vida - milhares de vidas salvas do apodrecimento e da degeneração. Uma morte e cem vidas em troca - ora, isso é uma questão de aritimética.” - Fiodor Dostoievski

12. “Feeling - what authentic human fun!” - Jeff Lindsay

13. “There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.” - Joseph Pulitzer

14. “I don't wanna take my time going to work, I got a motorcycle and a sleeping bag and ten or fifteen girls. What the hell I wanna go off and go to work for? Work for what? Money? I got all the money in the world. I'm the king, man. I run the underworld, guy. I decide who does what and where they do it at. What am I gonna run around like some teeny bopper somewhere for someone elses money? I make the money man, I roll the nickels. The game is mine. I deal the cards” - Charles Manson

15. “When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

16. “I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.” - Clive Barker

17. “It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.” - Alan Moore

18. “When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I'd turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I'm sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can't help feeling that if the two had ever met they'd have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage's world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?” - Alan Moore

19. “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

20. “Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.” - Vittori Alfieri

21. “I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.” - Jim Thompson

22. “It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.” - Christopher Hitchens

23. “Well, you may abuse me, be angry with me if you like," Porfiry Petrovitch began again, "but I can't resist. Allow me one little question (I know I am troubling you). There is just one little notion I want to express, simply that I may not forget it.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

24. “Murphy's face went through several mutations as he spoke, as if small animals were scurrying about just beneath his skin.” - Pete Hautman

25. “And then there was her face: her white skin, her brown eyes, and her expression, so soft and beautiful; she looked as though she were constantly getting ready to ask a question. Even an immaculately crafted doll could not have been as lovely.” - Natsuo Kirino

26. “Anxiously, he touched the lump on his head again, then felt his injured leg, groaning. "The whole affair is a mystery to me," he said. "Who would want to steal anything from me?" "Perhaps a thief...?" ventured Julius.” - Henry Winterfeld

27. “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

28. “I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.” - Peter O'Toole

29. “AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.” - Ambrose Bierce

30. “Don’t feel guilty for a crime you have not committed – commit it and be guilt free” - Amit Abraham

31. “Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

32. “Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.” - Kate Summerscale

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

34. “If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.” - Leonard Sax

35. “If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?” - David Simon

36. “If you were going to be successful in the world of crime, you needed a reputation for honesty.” - Terry Pratchett

37. “... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.” - Judith Lewis Herman

38. “Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.” - Jim Thompson

39. “In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.…Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

40. “The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.” - Noam Chomsky

41. “The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.” - Maya Angelou

42. “Society wants to believe it can identify evil people, or bad or harmful people, but it's not practical. There are no stereotypes.” - Ted Bundy

43. “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

44. “But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.” - James Lee Burke

45. “We want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanity’s rebellion from God.” - R.C. Sproul

46. “I don't have a command for 'stop wagging your tail'.” - Elle Saverini

47. “We're all prostitutes sir we're all selling ourselves for something” - Saira Viola

48. “Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow - James Matthew Barrie” - John Charles Harman

49. “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

50. “It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.” - Edward Humes

51. “He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?” - Edward Humes

52. “You can only rise so far by climbing on others’ shoulders, you know.” - B. Barmanbek

53. “Now, this was a combination that she wouldn’t dare to dream of, even in her worst nightmare.” - B. Barmanbek

54. “She liked who she was becoming, despite the pain and frustration it brought.” - B. Barmanbek

55. “In post-modern finance, everybody took a risk when lending or borrowing.” - B. Barmanbek

56. “I’m just an apprentice, stuck between these borrowed first and last breaths that I was given, drinking water of life, and chasing the fire of knowledge, and waiting to mingle with my eternal and faithful love, earth.” - B. Barmanbek

57. “If we found a ticket to Disneyland would you think we should arrest Mickey Mouse?” - Diane L. Randle

58. “We thought we were invincible and Dominic proved us all wrong,” - Jesse Carlisle” - Nina D'Angelo

59. “Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.” - Anna Quindlen

60. “...And eventually, he (Charles Manson) testified to an empty court, as Bugliosi had convinced the presiding judge Older, that Manson's hypnotic powers might convince the jury he was innocent.” - Nikolas Schreck

61. “There's an old saying," Buck said. "A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty of them you're a damn genius.” - James Carlos Blake

62. “It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.” - Margaret Atwood

63. “We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.” - Emile Durkheim

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

65. “Stay home and the crooks win. They get the night, by default and concession, the night which should rightly belong to all of us.” - Claire Cross

66. “...people demonize certain types of crime - it's a way of distancing ourselves from the monsters...” - John Geddes

67. “I wrote that certain things were leaving me nauseated. I said that judges made me feel that way. Not most of them but all of them. I said that you for example, the judge I'm writing this to, made me feel nauseated. The nausea came from understanding that people produced by every conceivable advantage got to decide whether someone like Jalen lived or died and what was worse was they never fucking seemed to decide that the person should live, that a person's life, any person, was more important than whether some fat fuck at a country club thought you were hard enough on crime or whether you continue to get sufficient reelection campaign contributions you worthless retarded piece of shit. Why should you be allowed to decide anything beyond what you have for lunch you mental infant?” - Sergio De La Pava

68. “I'm here to tell niggas it ain't all swell.There's Heaven then there's Hell niggasOne day your cruisin' in your seven,Next day your sweatin', forgettin' your lies,Alibis ain't matchin' up, bullshit catchin' upHit with the RICO, they repoed your vehicleEverything was all good just a week ago'Bout to start bitchin' ain't you?Ready to start snitchin' ain't you?I forgive you. Weak ass, hustlin' just ain't youAside from the fast carsHoneys that shake they ass in barsYou know you wouldn't be involvedWith the Underworld dealers, carriers of mac-millersEast coast bodiers, West coast cap-peelersLittle monkey niggas turned gorillas.” - Jay-Z

69. “There is always a unique atmosphere in the car when you drive through the City with a dead body in the back.” - Steen Langstrup

70. “I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don’t give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what I feel. And it has nothing to do with all that. And you also feel for me. And if you don’t know that, then maybe it’s you who needs to have therapy to gain a better knowledge of yourself.” - Olga Núñez Miret

71. “Jimmy Sadd is the most evil man I’ve ever known. I mean really evil. I’m not talking about tough, or cruel – all the bosses are tough and cruel. You’ll never get anywhere in our world if you’re not respected. But Jimmy ... God damn, Bruno, getting involved with Sadd ... I’d rather do a deal with the devil himself. Sadd is worse. You’ll never get out.”George HansonIn The Shadow of Sadd.” - Steen Langstrup

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

73. “It's odd to imagine, of course: you pass a car on a lonely rural highway; you sit beside a man in a diner and share views with him; you wait behind a customer checking into a motel, a friendly man with a winning smile and twinkling hazel eyes, who's happy to fill you in on his life's story and wants you to like him - odd to think this man is cruising around with a loaded pistol, making up his mind about which bank he'll soon rob.' - Richard Ford, Canada” - Richard Ford

74. “Saltei da quinta nuvem para o primeiro plano planejando revirarrevoltas e crimes contra os costumes.” - Filipe Russo

75. “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

76. “Hunger and necessity are poor teachers of morality. A society that cannot provide the basics of life does not get its laws obeyed.” - A.J. Quinnell

77. “Deceit for personal gain is one of history's most recurring crimes. Man's first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind.” - Criss Jami

78. “Sometimes love can be both the punishment and the crime.” - Steve Maraboli

79. “In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate.” - Barry Glassner