Albert Camus Quotes About Crime

• We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.

  Albert Camus

  Tasks, World, Crime

• We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.

  Albert Camus

  Children, Philosophy, Perfect

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.3, Vintage

• There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

  Albert Camus

  Life, Passion, Logic

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.3, Vintage

• Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

  Albert Camus

  Law, Yesterday, Trials

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.3, Vintage

• I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Vices, Would Be

  Albert Camus (2012). “Lyrical and Critical Essays”, p.265, Vintage

• For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Law, Trying

  Albert Camus (2012). “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays”, p.190, Vintage

• No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait.

  Albert Camus

  Waiting, Doubt, Stubborn

• When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

  Albert Camus

  Character, Wonder, Crime

  Albert Camus (1957). “The fall”, Vintage

• When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

  Albert Camus

  Fall, Responsibility, Men

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.25, Vintage

• Knowing what [Christ] knew , knowing all about mankind--ah! who would have thought that the crime is not so much to make others die, but to die oneself--confronted day and night with his innocent crime, it became too difficult to go on. It was better to get it over with, to not defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to have survived, and to go elsewhere, where, perhaps, he would be supported.

  Albert Camus

  God, Night, Order

• ... habit starts at the second crime. At the first one, something is ending.

  Albert Camus

  Firsts, Murder, Crime

• Crime too is a form of solitude, even if one thousand get together to commit it. And it is right for me to die alone, after having lived and killed alone.

  Albert Camus

  Solitude, Together, Crime

• ... man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified... Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonabledesire and claims to give life a form it does not have.

  Albert Camus

  Mean, Men, Ideas

  Albert Camus (1957). “the Rebel”

• Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

  Albert Camus

  Challenges, Age, Peculiar

  Albert Camus (1965). “Caligula and Cross purpose”

• How many crimes are permitted simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.

  Albert Camus

  Integrity, Law, Justice

• For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.

  Albert Camus

  Greatness, Echoes, Humanity

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.276, Vintage

You May Also Like:

Jean-Paul Sartre

Franz Kafka

Marguerite Duras

Friedrich Nietzsche

Simone de Beauvoir

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Marcel Proust