Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Crime

• Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Night, Oysters, Joy

• I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Needs, Disease, Crime

• All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Tired, Men, Water

• The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Artist, Creative, Criticism

  The Innocence of Father Brown "The Blue Cross" (1911)

• ...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Healing, Evil

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.103, Simon and Schuster

• I will go forth as a real outlaw," he said, "and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Crime

• Such professions as the soldier and the lawyer ... give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. ... If you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have gotten him off.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Believe, Opportunity, Giving

• You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Thinking, May, Crime

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