The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
—Maximilien Robespierre
Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.
—Publilius Syrus
The judge is condemned when the criminal is absolved.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.
—Randy K. Milholland
The key is to commit crimes so confusing that police feel too stupid to even write a crime report about them.
—Voltaire
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
—Woody Allen
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.
—Unknown
It's universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond this one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy,… or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide who exactly is stealing from whom. One person's crime is another person's profit.
—Abbie Hoffman
As one reads history… one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
—Oscar Wilde
Punishment is directed primarily at the potentially guilty.
—Michel Foucault
The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.
—Will Rogers
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
—Theodor W. Adorno
Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen
—Robert Ingersoll
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