Crime Quotes - Page 26

• Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Luck, United States, Would Be

  Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “America Day by Day”

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• Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all; if we consider it as a madness, we are equally justifiable in applying to it the readiest and the surest means of oppression.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Mean, Madness, Oppression

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• White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

  Adrienne Rich

  Hate, Passion, White

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• Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

  Gail Sheehy

  People, Goal, Personality

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• The one thing prostitution is not is a 'victimless crime.' It attracts a wide species of preying criminals and generates a long line of victims, beginning with the most obvious and least understood - the prostitute herself.

  Gail Sheehy

  Long, Criminals, Lines

  Gail Sheehy (1973). “Hustling: Prostitution in Our Wide Open Society”, New York : Delacorte Press

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• The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

  Edmund Burke

  Country, War, Men

  Edmund Burke (1855). “The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke”, p.204

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• television and radio violence was considered by most experts of minimal importance as a contributory cause of youthful killing. ... there were always enough experts to assure the public that crime and violence had nothing to do with crime and violence.

  Marya Mannes

  Experts, Television, Radio

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• My True Name is so well known in the Records, or Registers at Newgate, and in the Old-Baily, and there are some things of such Consequence still depending there, relating to my particular Conduct, that it is not to be expected I should set my Name, or the Account of my Family to this Work; perhaps, after my Death it may be better known, at present it would not be proper, no, not tho' a general Pardon should be issued, even without Exceptions and reserve of Persons or Crimes.

  Daniel Defoe

  Book, Names, Records

  Daniel Defoe (1993). “Moll Flanders”, p.7, Wordsworth Editions

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Political

  Margaret Mead, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1980). “Aspects of the Present”, William Morrow

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• Drunkenness is not only the cause of crime, but it is crime; and if any encourage drunkenness for the sake of the profit derived from the sale of drink, they are guilty of a form of moral assassination as criminal as any that has ever been practiced by the braves of any country or of any age.

  John Ruskin

  Country, Brave, Age

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• As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime. In due time, when we have nothing better to set people to work at, it may be right to let them make lace and cut jewels; but as long as there are any who have no blankets for their beds, and no rags for their bodies, so long it is blanket-making and tailoring we must set people to work at, not lace.

  John Ruskin

  Cutting, Jewels, Land

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• Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them.

  Rebecca West

  War, Hands, Psychology

  Rebecca West (1952). “The meaning of treason”

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• It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.

  Simone Weil

  Beauty, Essence, Vices

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.61, Routledge

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• If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures.

  Simone Weil

  God, Forgiving, Made

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• The social rights of children must be recognized so that a world suited to their needs may be constructed for them. The greatest crime that society commits is that of wasting the money which it should use for children on things that will destroy them and society itself as well.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Rights, Needs

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• If we commit any crime, or do any good here, it must be in thought; for our words are few and our deeds none at all.

  Hannah More

  Our Words, Deeds, Commit

  Hannah More (1862). “The Life of Hannah More: With Selections from Her Correspondence”, p.65

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• The impulse to make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free is an old one ... When we are badly frightened, we think we can make ourselves safer by sacrificing some of our liberties. We did it during the McCarthy era out of fear of communism. Less liberty is regularly proposed as a solution to crime, to pornography, to illegal immigration, to abortion, to all kinds of threats.

  Molly Ivins

  Sacrifice, Thinking, Rights

  "'Evil Cowards' Threaten Freedom" by Molly Ivins, www.sfgate.com. April 25, 1995.

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• By the Reagan era, the 'culture of poverty' had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to 'defer gratification' or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Jobs, Attitude, Addiction

  "Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, American Poverty, 50 Years Later". www.tomdispatch.com. March 15, 2012.

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• ... any woman who accepts aloneness as the natural by-product of success is accepting a punishment for a crime she didn't commit. And she is not acknowledging one of the most precious lessons of the women's movement, the lessons of community ... We may not able to tell women that there is safety in freedom. But we certainly can say, with absolute certainty, that for free women, the only safety is in numbers.

  Marlo Thomas

  Punishment, Numbers, Safety

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• Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Illness

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1997). “An Accidental Autobiography”, Mariner Books

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• I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.

  Delmore Schwartz

  Police, Way, Married

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• It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

  Bias of Priene

  Law, Law Breakers, Makers

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• Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.

  Hannah Arendt

  Men, People, Humanity

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.189, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Crime like virtue has its degrees; and timid innocence was never known to blossom suddenly into extreme license.

  Jean Racine

  Degrees, Innocence, Virtue

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• Experience shows that the frequent use of severe punishment has never rendered a people better. The death of a criminal is a less effective means of restraining crimes than the permanent example of a man deprived of his liberty during the whole of his life to make amends for the injury he has done to the public.

  Catherine the Great

  Mean, Men, People

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