There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.
—Hannah Arendt
Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
—Freda Adler
We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.
—Margaret Mead
All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.
—Michelle Alexander
No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.
—Eric Sevareid
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that is often perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
—Robert Rice
Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.
—Howard Scott
The reason there is so little crime in Germany is that it's against the law.
—Alex Levin
Sir, [the American colonists] are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.
—Samuel Johnson
The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for errors; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.
—Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime.
—Emma Goldman
The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.
—Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, failure, misfortune—all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal. And what do you do with him? You punish him. Why not punish a man for having consumption? The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical.
—Robert Ingersoll
It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole race of [humankind] and the world with [it] .… I make monastic silence a protest against the lies of politicians, propagandists, and agitators, and when I speak it is to deny that my faith and my church can ever be aligned with these forces of injustice and destruction. But it is true, nevertheless, that the faith in which I believe is also invoked by many who believe in war, believe in racial injustices, believe in self-righteous and lying forms of tyranny. My life must, then, be a protest against these also, and perhaps against these most of all.
—Thomas Merton
When the judge calls the criminal's name out, he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them both opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow? It's well known some criminals have been great men.
—Jean Genet