“Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.”

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman - “Crime is naught but misdirected energy...” 1

Similar quotes

“Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.”

Margaret Thatcher
Read more

“Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime. Violence requires all different kinds of energy, and most drug addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what their professional crime lets them afford. Drug addicts are often burglars, therefore.”

David Foster Wallace
Read more

“Energy is what I had lived so long beside. Energy is who I had married - the energy that permeates life, that comes out of every pore and explodes into the world.”

Marie Tillman
Read more

“If evil geniuses are so rare, why do so many bad people get away with so many crimes against their fellow citizens, and, when they become leaders of nations, against humanity?”

Dean Koontz
Read more

“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
Read more