c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A glass poured to air for the one who sits with us unseen; the patron and protector, the Crooked Warden, the Father of Necessary Pretexts. Thanks for deep pockets poorly guarded. Thanks for watchmen asleep at their posts. Thanks for the city to nurture us and the night to hide us. Thanks for friends to help us spend the loot.
— Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
A society gets the criminals it deserves.
— Val McDermid, Killing the Shadows
Rectory always sounded to me like a place you would find a proctologist.
— Jeff Lindsay, Dexter in the Dark
It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.
— P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens
It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to 'serve the community' by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork's crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get in sideways.
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.
— Dinesh D'Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative
Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal
— Murray N. Rothbard
I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain't a heck of a way to be in bed with a pretty woman. The two of you arguing about murder, and threatening each other, when you're supposed to be in love and you could be doing something pretty nice. And then I thought, well, maybe it ain't so strange after all. Maybe it's like this with most people, everyone doing pretty much the same thing except in a different way. And all the time they're holding heaven in their hands.
— Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280
To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Criminal: a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.
— Howard Scott
It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being. Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO. The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile. What a scamp.
— Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter
The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Stealing to eat ain’t criminal—stealing to be rich is.
— Andrew Vachss, A Bomb Built in Hell
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
— Raymond Chandler, The High Window
Society prepares the crime
—  the criminal commits it.
The world was getting dangerously crowded with crazy people.
— John Dunning, The Bookman's Wake
It was the American middle class. No one's house cost more than two or three year's salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks' paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked -- because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?
— Michael Moore, Here Comes Trouble
But people like the doll guy who sells women and the dog guy who buys women, and other guys who, say, rape women, or maybe don’t go as far as violent rape but treat women like objects instead of people—sure, there’s a difference in the level of crime, but it’s all the same thing, where women become a canvas for throwing emotional baggage, Jackson Pollock style.
— Taylor Stevens, The Doll
He was not looking forward to breaking the law. He was straight now. He'd matured. Crime no longer excited him.What?' Ronald said.I didn't say anything.'You're breathing heavy.
— Jennifer Crusie, Faking It
I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.
— G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques
Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them.
— Machado de Assis, The Devil's Church and Other Stories
The security officer smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ to me before Igave him ID.”“It’s a sick world, Eve.” He resisted taking her hand for another squeeze. “A sick,sad world.
— J.D. Robb, New York to Dallas
Holmes took up the stone and held it against the light. "It's a bonny thing," said he. "Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil's pet baits. In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty years old. It was found in the banks of the Amoy River in soutern China and is remarkable in having every characteristic of the carbuncle, save that it is blue in shade instead of ruby red. In spite of its youth, it has already a sinister history. There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide, and several robberies brought about for the sake of this forty-grain weight of crystallised charcoal. Who would think that so pretty a toy would be a purveyor to the gallows and the prison?
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more.
— Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.
— Peter O'Toole
Somewhere in the ocean, a shark was missing its cold eyes because this man had them.
— Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist
I want to kill this degenerate bastard brother of yours. But I am not selfish, I do not want to deprive you of that honor.
— William Balsamo, Crime Incorporated: The Inside Story of the Mafia's First 100 Years
He's clearly a man with a mission, but it's not one of vengeance. Bruce is not after personal revenge ... He's much bigger than that; he's much more noble than that. He wants the world to be a better place, where a young Bruce Wayne would not be a victim ... In a way, he's out to make himself unnecessary. Batman is a hero who wishes he didn't have to exist.
— Frank Miller, Batman: Year One
When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.
— Richard Stark, The Mourner
Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man.
— James Ellroy
There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.
— Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost
Don’t feel guilty for a crime you have not committed – commit it and be guilt free
— Amit Abraham
…but his problem was infinity; his problem was time running along the x-axis versus stress running along the y-axis, and there never seemed to be time without stress. Stress was a constant.
— Andrew Barrett, The Third Rule - The Complete Story
The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
So I'm over there in England, you know, trying to get news about the [L.A.] riots... and all these Brit people are trying to sympathize with me... 'Oh Bill, crime is horrible. Bill, if it's any consolation crime is horrible here, too.' ...Shutup. This is Hobbitown and I am Bilbo Hicks, Okay? This is a land of fairies and elves. You do not have crime like we have crime, but I appreciate you trying to be, you know, Diplomatic. You gotta see English crime. It's hilarious, you don't know if you're reading the front page or the comic section over there. I swear to God. I read an article - front page of the paper - one day, in England: 'Yesterday, some Hooligans knocked over a dustbin in Shafsbry.' Wooooo... 'The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become roughians? I would hate to be a dustbin in Shafsbry tonight.
— Bill Hicks
It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.
— Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
We've got our heads pulled low inside of our hooded sweatshirts and our eyes are shifty. We look exactly like you'd expect someone to look if they were minutes away from committing a major crime.
— Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.
— Anaïs Nin
The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.
— Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man
Most investigators don't even know what the word means. You stop the cops from using informants and the only crimes they'd ever solve would be those by deranged postal workers who come to work once too often.
— Andrew Vachss, False Allegations
You cannot have a society of angels except in heaven
— Michela Wrong
Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.
— Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
— Emma Goldman
I suppose the mothers of most twelve-year-old boys live with the uneasy conviction that their sons are embarked upon a secret life of crime.
— Shirley Jackson, Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories
I am the scourge of God
— Peter Ackroyd, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree
Do you think he's the murderer?""It's worse than that -- he's an actor!
— Julian Fellowes, Gosford Park: The Shooting Script
If a drug dealer falls in West Baltimore and no one is there to hear him, does he make a sound?
— David Simon
So, this is how it will play out. Today, in the sunshine, on the noisy sidewalk at Logan Airport in Boston, with people and their suitcases bumping into me, and taxi horns blaring and strangers going about their routine day, I’m about to learn that I have lost my husband. I will finally know his secrets.
— Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker, The Fugitive's Doctor
I had received a t-shirt from my best friend Veronica at my police academy graduation. It reads, ‘Throw your donut in the opposite direction and the cops won’t get you.’ I love wearing that t-shirt.
— Suzie Ivy, Bad Luck Officer
A fish might more easily live on the apex of a rock than a man accustomed to crime live a life of virtue. (“The Story of Prince Barkiarokh”)
— William Beckford, The Episodes of Vathek
..... this isn't some LA country rock jam reminiscing on the pyschtotropic pot pansies of Haight Ashbury . This is the soot and smut of London mate !
— Saira Viola
I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they're a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there's this thick, high wall. At least, that's how I saw it at first. ...I became a lot less sure of myself. In other words, I started seeing it like this: that there really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine. Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-mache. The second I leaned on it, I'd probably fall right through and end up on the other side. Or maybe it's that the other side has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven't noticed.
— Haruki Murakami, After Dark
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty
He who has never tasted jail Lives well within the legal pale, While he who's served a heavy sentence Renews the racket, not repentance.
— Ogden Nash, I'm a Stranger Here Myself
They say that even of a good thing you can have too much. But I doubt it. True, such good things as sunbathing, beer, and tobacco may be intemperately pursued to the detriment of their devotees; yet, to my mind, one cannot have too much of a good murder.
— William Roughead, Classic Crimes
It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy.
— Scott Turow, Limitations
And then there was her face: her white skin, her brown eyes, and her expression, so soft and beautiful; she looked as though she were constantly getting ready to ask a question. Even an immaculately crafted doll could not have been as lovely.
— Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque
...And eventually, he (Charles Manson) testified to an empty court, as Bugliosi had convinced the presiding judge Older, that Manson's hypnotic powers might convince the jury he was innocent.
— Nikolas Schreck
Here, in Lorrain's poisoned little jewel of a tale (“The Man Who Made Wax Heads”) the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights, in which exploitation becomes collusion, the ripples of guilt spread outward, and the real criminal slips away. In the end, responsibility is lodged firmly with the consumer, forced – he must confess – by his own perverse desires, to buy into the values of this particularly black market.
— Jennifer Birkett
I stood behind the man’s chair, my blade at his throat.	“Why do you do it?” I asked, knowing he wouldn’t answer. “Kill people, and blow up buildings, and sell drugs?”	It was what they all did. Committed crimes. That was why I killed them.	“You’re a criminal, a terrorist, a danger. And I have been asked to take you out.” I told him. 	I was legend now, yet he asked the same question all the others did.	“What is your name?”	My sensitive ears tuned out the slit as my sword cut his neck.	I walked around the chair to see his face. I watched as his eyes–slowly at first–changed from blue to milky white. His skin went pale.	And as I heard him take his last breath, I ducked in so my lips hovered at his ear, and whispered, “My name, is Sharden.
— Alysha Speer, Sharden
A second red-orange spearhead leaps straight at O'Shaughnessy. The whole world seems to stand still. Then the gun behind it crashes, and there's a cataclysm of pain all over him, and a shock goes through him as if he ran head-on into a stone wall.A voice from the car says blurredly, while the ground rushes up to meet him, 'Finish him up, you guys! I'm getting so I don't trust their looks no more, no matter how stiff they act!' ("Jane Brown's Body")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
Gosh, it's easy!' he marveled, open-mouthed. 'I never knew before how easy it is to kill anyone! Twenty years to grow 'em, and all it takes is one little push!'He was suddenly drunk with some new kind of power, undiscovered until this minute. The power of life and death over his fellowmen! Everyone had it, everyone strong enough to raise a violent arm, but they were afraid to use it. Well, he wasn't! And here he'd been going around for weeks living from hand to mouth, without any money, without enough food, when everything he wanted lay within his reach all the while! He had been green all right, and no mistake about it!Death had become familiar. At seven it had been the most mysterious thing in the world to him, by midnight it was already an old story. ("Dusk To Dawn")
— Cornell Woolrich
Our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught.
— Nicholas Nassim Taleb
An ax came through the door. Then two firefighters. They looked down at and assistant mall manager crying and wearing a melted toupee, sitting cross-legged next to a mall cop with a bleeding ankle and a mouth full of paper. One of the firefighters look at the other. "Not again.
— Tim Dorsey, When Elves Attack: A Joyous Christmas Greeting from the Criminal Nutbars of the Sunshine State
Even sentenced to twenty-five years in prison Ted didn’t get what he deserved. Maybe his prison mates would give it to him.
— Suzie Ivy, Bad Luck Officer
Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.
— Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.…Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929
As an artist you look into yourself to understand the human potential to be all kinds of things that are not necessarily pleasant but are real - a criminal, a murderer, a sadist, a rapist; to be all of these things that many people are. You can't allow yourself to say, 'I'm a different species from those people.' Because you aren't.The criminal as monster is kind of common. That's very convenient because you can then say, 'Of course I'm not a monster, therefore I'm not a criminal therefore I have no potential in tern of criminality.' And that lets you off the hook. That gives you a nice wall between yourself and them.
— David Cronenberg
Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they're mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.
— Philippe Claudel, Brodeck
Parker looked distressed. He had confidence in Wimsey's judgment, and, in spite of his own interior certainty, he felt shaken."My dear man, where's the flaw in [this case]?""There isn't one ... There's nothing wrong about it at all, except that the girl's innocent.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
I refer to what is called mysterium iniquitatis, meaning, as I see it, that a crime in the final analysis remains inexplicable inasmuch as it cannot be fully traced back to biological, psychological and/or sociological factors. Totally explaining one’s crime would be tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being but a machine to be repaired. Even criminals themselves abhor this treatment and prefer to be held responsible for their deeds. From a convict serving his sentence in an Illinois penitentiary I received a letter in which he deplored that 'the criminal never has a chance to explain himself. He is offered a variety of excuses to choose from. Society is blamed and in many instances the blame is put on the victim.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Last summer, in London at least, the hoodie was transformed from a benign piece of leisurewear into a uniform for the disaffected, the angry, the malevolent. So much so that ‘hoodie’ was no longer a piece of clothing. It was a whole person. A hoodie was somebody likely to steal, plunder and do you unimaginable harm.People were crossing the street when a hoodie crossed their path - even if it was a 70-year-old gentleman walking his dog. That’s how quickly the fear had permeated the collective consciousness. And lifting the hood was tantamount to cocking a gun.
— Mark Capell, RIOT MURDER - Myles Morgan Undercover #2
Another note to self
—  turn cellphone to silent when you’re trying to be sneaky.
I am the keeper of my husband’s history. This is a self-appointed role. I plan to learn everything about his life of the past and carry him into a future that is bright with hope. I shall guard his history from rumor and allegation and learn only the truth of his past. I shall then remember the things he cannot allow himself to remember. I shall find out all that I can about my husband’s life and will ensure that the lawyers know the truth. I shall fight the innuendo and crusade for true justice. I refuse to be vanquished.
— Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker, The Fugitive's Doctor
This 'vampire' stuff is to stay right in this room. Until we have the assailant in custody we say nothing about these girls being drained of blood. No more rumors. No reports in the papers," he added, looking directly at me and ignoring my colleague from the opposition press. "The official opinion at this time is that the cause of death is 'undetermined and under investigation'. We don't want to start a panic. It's bad for police operations. It's bad for the people. And it's had for business.
— Jeff Rice, The Night Stalker
Listen, we got two stiffs and a river of red in a villa in Herne Bay...
— Rhys Chamberlain, Emotion
The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.
— Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
I want you to know that I have nothing against Orlando, though you are, of course, far more likely to get shot or robbed there than in London.
— Boris Johnson
Miss Howard: Like a good detective story myself. Lots of nonsense written, though. Criminal discovered in last Chapter. Everyone dumbfounded. Real crime - you'd know at once.
— Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Anxiously, he touched the lump on his head again, then felt his injured leg, groaning. "The whole affair is a mystery to me," he said. "Who would want to steal anything from me?" "Perhaps a thief...?" ventured Julius.
— Henry Winterfeld, Detectives in Togas
All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the old strong outside their circle to pursue the waiting possibilities which they call crime. The weak, the cowardly, the decent ones, live between these groups.
— George Zebrowski, Brute Orbits
In these electric times the criminal receives a cosmopolitan reputation. It is a privilege he shares with few other artists.
— Israel Zangwill, The Big Bow Mystery
And, in fact, if these crimes appeal less to the senses, they appeal more to the mind; and the mind, in the last analysis, is the profoundest part of us. For the novelist, therefore, there is a new type of tragedy to be derived from these crimes, more intellectual than physical in character, which do not really seem to be crimes to the superficial judgement of old materialistic societies because they do not involve bloodshed, and murder is committed only in the sphere of feelings and manners.
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques
And there above all of these shops hung a blood soaked sign: a red hand, the hand of a child that was neither male nor female and yet roused feelings of the most dejected and criminal love
— Georges Limbour
Maupassant is a man of mitigating circumstances, the lawyer who can bring the jurors around by demonstrating that they too could have committed such a crime. We are all murderers.
— Philippe Lejeune
Murphy's face went through several mutations as he spoke, as if small animals were scurrying about just beneath his skin.
— Pete Hautman, Short Money
When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people—relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print—create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task. “But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. “It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.“The silence of the dead says, Goodbye. “The silence of the missing says, Find me.
— Dennis Lehane, Gone, Baby, Gone
The evidence knocked clean out of their hands. Nothing but suspicion left…and you can’t arrest a murderer on suspicion, oh dear no! Only felonious loiterer’s and housebreakers and low scum like that. Not an artist in death, like Edmund Alfred Bickleigh, Esq. MRCS, LRCP.
— Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought
She was thankful that in her job, she didn’t have to choose sides—she fought against currency counterfeiters, stock and bond forgers, money launderers, diamond smugglers—in short, lowlifes like Spyro Leandrou who engaged in activities that were universally perceived as wrong.
— Mike Wells, Lust, Money & Murder, Book 11 - Panacea
In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns.
— James Patterson, Murder Games
I was raised to believe that all I could ever be was a criminal. It made me want to be anything but one. When you know that you can get away with any crime, it becomes a matter of self-respect to commit none. When there is no one to force you to stay within the norms of the society, self-control becomes all that stands between you and the person you want to be.
— Marina Simcoe, The Real Thing
A curse burns bright on crime.
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon
What most people see is a badge, behind and beyond the badge is what they need to know...the person.
— Donna     Brown, Behind and Beyond the Badge: Stories from the Village of First Responders with Cops, Firefighters, Dispatchers, Forensics, and Victim Advocates
Wasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?" "Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe.
— Pat Conroy, Beach Music
It was a street of conformity; where identical houses were painted at the same time every spring, a place of rules where gardens, parenthood and the future were planned with equal care, and even if everything went wrong the master plan remained in effect–keep up appearances, clip the hedges, mow the lawn, so that no one will suspect that there’s a third mortgage and that Mother’s headaches are caused by martinis not migraine.
— Margaret Millar, The Listening Walls
Don't make a career out of underestimating me." — Claire de Haven
— James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere
Sloane wasn't interested. As a police officer he was concerned with crime, not punishment.
— Catherine Aird, The Religious Body
He did his best to explain this to Inspector Sloan afterwards. 'A funny feeling, sir.' 'Yes?' Funny feelings were not encouraged at Berebury Police Station.
— Catherine Aird, Parting Breath
The Farmer’s Almanac promised a cold winter. The coldest in decades. Andrew grinned, unaware of how hideously ugly it made him. Let the winter be record breaking. The year would be marked in infamy and not for the weather alone. He could imagine the headlines, mentioning it as the winter of death, as his spree was just beginning. It would put the town on the map.
— Jaime Allison Parker, Justice of the Fox
The Roar of the engine penetrated through Bertram's Hotel from the street outside. Colonel Luscombe perceived that Ladislaus Malinowski was one of Elvira's heroes. "Well," he thought to himself, "better than one of those pop singers or crooners or long-haired Beatles or whatever they called themselves." Luscombe was old-fashioned in his views of young men.
— Agatha Christie, At Bertram's Hotel
She breathed an enormous sigh, looked at Poirot, Looked away, and suddenly blurted out, "You're too old. Nobody told me you were so old. I really don't want to be rude but - there it is. You're too old. I'm really sorry." She turned abruptly and blundered out of the room, rather like a desperate moth in lamplight. Poirot, his mouth open, heard the bang of the front door. He ejaculated: "Non d'un nom d'un nom...
— Agatha Christie, Third Girl
Hasan Pasha also gave the green light for Turks and Greeks to take whatever action they pleased against any Albanians they found: killing them was not a crime. Continuing his march, he executed all the Albanians he encountered, setting fire to a monastery where other were hiding and offering five sequins for every Albanian head brought him.
— Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews  1430-1950
He was the one for her. She somehow knew that no one could make her feel the way did. Not if she lived for another hundred years.
— Anam Iqbal, The Whyte Divide
In my experience, what defines a crime depends on who’s getting screwed.
— Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks
She is shocked by the rows of thick Plexiglas windows, each equipped with a telephone, each with a prisoner on one side and an outsider on the other. There is a teenage girl chatting with a prisoner who is presumably her father. There’s a married couple talking to their daughter. There’s a woman with a baby in her arms, sobbing into her phone as she begs her husband not to plead guilty for his crimes. Jail is terrifying to Geraldine, not only because it’s a house of criminals but also because it’s a cold slap in the face, a reminder of where she will eventually end up. “You’ve got to stay with me the whole time, Callo! I’m serious, you CANNOT leave me here.”“I’ll never,” Callo vows, but he’s eyeing her strangely. “Just remember which side of the glass you’re on right now, Geraldine.
— Rebecca McNutt, Listen is Silent, or The Usurer
A life might end, but sometimes their case lives forever.
— Charlie Donlea, The Girl Who Was Taken
You know you're writing a good thriller when you make yourself paranoid.
— Shirley B. Garrett, Deadly Compulsion
To discover what becomes of men who do not pay debts owed to Ratilla, one must visit the underworld.
— A.H. Septimius, Crowns Of Amara: The Return Of The Oracle
She was floating in the midst of a black sea, in the darkest of nights, with no hope or care to see light again. She was a mere wave away from drowning in blackness.
— Anam Iqbal, The Whyte Divide
He darted for her; his blade wielded smooth and steady in front of him. She didn't hold back either; when they joined, their weapons clanked and sparked with an icy rage. They danced around one another; their feet light yet balanced, their arms twisting and turning with every thundering blow they made.
— Anam Iqbal, The Whyte Divide
For something to be a crime there must be both an actus reus and mens rea — that is, a criminal act accompanied by a criminal state of mind.
— Alan Dershowitz
So you shoot people," she said quietly. "You're a killer.""Me? How?""The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read.""Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them."She didn't say anything. "I didn't have to," I said. "I might have. I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at.""That makes you a killer at heart, like all cops.""Oh, nuts.
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Death was a friend to her; she was unafraid of it: bringing to to others, meeting it herself. And yet, she'd flinched from it today... What was it about that man that she just couldn't let go? Couldn't conquer the part of her heart that had loved him?
— Anam Iqbal, The Whyte Divide
As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
The cruel man is of misanthropic temperament, and is a man of moods, oscillating from quiet brooding to sudden explosions. If a man like this does not fight this unhappy provision of his soul during his youth, under no circumstances could he a void becoming furious - and foolish. There are those who would leave it up to God, but to ensure justice on the earth, and not fob it off to the Divinity, it is mandatory that people know both virtue and its benefits, since the virtues lead to unity among them, not the war of all against all. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to conserve them, and show that crime can only return misfortunes and destruction, including of the criminal himself. Who is the last victim of his crimes.
— Frederick the Great, Anti-Machiavel
Those is seek to profit from the torment of others will eventually pay the piper
— Tony Alleyne, Click, Click Bang!
As he left, he saw the streets were just as deserted and quiet as before, but now he knew it was an illusion. There were ninjas, darker than a starless night, watching their territory and his every move from the rooftops high above.
— Anam Iqbal, The Whyte Divide
...even if all they did was look at each other, it rattled her entire being because there was no thought or person or barrier between them. Not a single one. They were both thoroughly absorbed in every moment they spent together. It was terrifying. Like being swept away by a powerful wind, where your body rendered all its control to another force that could ignite as well as destroy you.
— Anam Iqbal, The Whyte Divide
Everybody talks about foul dens and filthy slums in which crime can run riot; but it's just the other way. They are called foul, not because crimes are committed, but because crimes are discovered. It's in the neat, spotless, clean and tidy places that crime can run riot; no mud to make footprints; no dregs to contain poison; kind servants washing out all traces of the murder; and the murderer killing and cremating six wives and all for want of a little Christian dirt.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown
Well, if my crime is love, then I am indeed guilty
— Elise Kova, Earth's End
Crime isn't that complicated. People steal because taking something gives them something. If they're not in it for the money, they're in it for control. The act of taking, of breaking the rules, makes them feel powerful. They're in it for the sheer defiance. Some people steal to stay alive, and some steal to feel alive.
— V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic
Sexual abuse is also a secret crime, one that usually has no witness. Shame and secrecy keep a child from talking to siblings about the abuse, even if all the children in a family are being sexually assaulted. In contrast, if a child is physically or emotionally abused, the abuse is likely to occur in front of the other children in the family, at least some of the time. The physical and emotional abuse becomes part of the family's explicit history. Sexual abuse does not.
— Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
It’s as if he’s trodden in my footsteps, seen what I’ve seen, felt what I’ve felt, as I’ve criss-crossed the moors countless times.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
They stole you from me. They took you away for seven years. Your entire lifetime. A life sentence. The waiting has been endless. The watching. The planning. Now, finally, I’m almost ready. I’ve got a few things to take care of and then we can be reunited.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
Make no mistake, my darling. I am coming for you. I will take you back.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
If we were walking here together, I’d point out the carnivorous plants that grow on this spot: sundews with sticky red leaves, eating insects to sustain them because the soil is so poor. If you were with me, I’d take you to the Doubler Stones, where thousands of years ago, Neolithic peoples carved channels in the rock to drain away the blood from their sacrifices. I would show you where the plover nests, and the green hairstreak butterfly lays its eggs. I love this place. I love this land. It’s part of me, it’s part of who I am. But it’s no place for you: a seven-year-old girl in a princess costume.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
Where I’m taking you, no one will ever find us. We’ll have all the time in the world for you to grow to love me as much as I love you.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
I ask you to kill my father for the crime of bringing me into existence.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
Tesco at the best of times is soulless – but it’s so much worse at 6 in the morning. It’s not as empty as I thought it would be. Who the fuck shops at 6 a.m.? e florescent lights flicker. e shelf upon shelf of coloured cans make my eyes go funny. Everything is hard and shiny and there’s so much fucking choice. Why do I have to choose from thirty kinds of granola? Do I want Country Crunch or Rude Health? Raisins and almonds or tropical? Goji berries and chia seeds or Strawberry Surprise? I’ll just buy the Tesco range – that’ll be easiest. No, wait, there’s Tesco finest*, Tesco Everyday Value and Tesco Free From. What can be so damn fine about granola? You eat it everyday and what could it be free from? It hasn’t got anything unhealthy in it! What could one possibly take out? Actually, we don’t need any fucking granola.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
Mum, your heart is the same size as your fist,’ she told me once in delight, and we both made our hands into fists and held them against our chests and bumped them together: hands as hearts.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
He could have killed me for the blunder— which really wasn’t my fault— but I was lucky , and he gave me another chance. The two officers who questioned him were also incredibly lucky for not having had any idea who it was they’d been questioning.
— Floyd C. Forsberg, The Toughest Prison of All
I don’t believe he was deliberately taking indecent pictures, they’re too artistic; he’s managed to capture that magical moment when a child’s mind spins into a make-believe world. But actually, what Jack did is steal something – a child’s innocence – whilst creating something darker that will resonate with the adults looking at these photos: themes of sexuality and death, the leitmotifs that run through fairy tales, the stories that we tell ourselves about our children.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
She said: Sheriff how come you to let crime get so out of hand in your county? Sounded like a fair question I reckon. Maybe it was a fair question. Anyway I told her, I said: It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
She said that the mummy and the daddy took their daughter up onto the moor. They had a picnic. They’d brought all of her favourite food – cheese sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off and strawberry-pink cupcakes – and when the little girl had finished eating, she looked around for her mummy and the daddy. But they’d gone. They’d left Evelyn on the moor by herself.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
I can’t believe I ever thought reading to her was a chore. I’d sit here some nights, fidgeting, thinking of all the things I needed to do, my voice hoarse, reluctant to read, ‘just one more chapter,’ wishing I could escape to my glass of wine. What did I have to do that was so important? What could be more important than reading my daughter a bedtime story?
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
Here we are, squabbling over tuna fucking sandwiches and there she is – almond-shaped green eyes, snub nose, lopsided grin, the hint of a dimple in her cheek. ‘MISSING’ is stamped over her face in large black letters.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
Evie is our beautiful, dark-haired, green-eyed child,’ I say. I can hear the tremor in my voice. ‘Like many seven-year-old girls, she’s obsessed with princesses. We think she looks more like a fairy. She loves Lego and painting. She laughs easily. She has pretend tea parties in a tree in our garden and invites all her dolls. She wants to be an artist when she grows up. Please find her. Please bring her back to us. We miss her beyond measure. She is the love of our life.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
Michelle had great admiration for criminals and crime, though only from a distance.
— Michelle Tea, Black Wave
From a mathematical point of view, however, trust is hard to quantify. That's a challenge for people building models. Sadly, it's far easier to keep counting arrests, to build models that assume we're birds of a feather and treat us as such. Innocent people surrounded by criminals get treated badly, and criminals surrounded by law-abiding public get a pass. And because of the strong correlation between poverty and reported crime, the poor continue to get caught up in the digital dragnets. The rest of us barely have to think about them.
— Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
She shivers. ‘I can’t understand why anyone would want to live out there. You’d be totally isolated.’ 	I do. I could imagine waking up each day and instead of looking out of the window and seeing the moor in the distance, you’d be in the heart of it, feeling the wind turn, the storm rage, the rain lash, hear the plovers piping.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
The Angel of Death had sworn retribution, and she wasn’t going to stop until she’d killed them all.
— Anam Iqbal, The Whyte Divide
This was different, spontaneous, unrestricted. This was what dancing was supposed to feel like - like freedom.
— Anam Iqbal, The Whyte Divide
And that was when it really came home to me what I was about to do. I was going to rob a bank, committing the additional crime of arson in the process, and if I got caught I'd go to prison.Well, I thought, go on selling second-hand jalopies for another forty years and maybe somebody'll give you a testimonial and a forty-dollar watch.
— Charles   Williams, The Hot Spot
It is known all over the world that there are no secrets in the ghetto and as long as you keep those secrets, you may keep your life.
— Felix Alexander, The Last Valentine
That hurts my pride, Watson. It is a petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. It becomes a personal matter with me now..."-Sherlock Holmes--The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Five Orange Pips-
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Illustrated
Can you feel it? The vibration? It’s the energy from everyone around us. It’s in the air. If you’re dying and you think no one can save you, just go out and stretch your arms into the air and absorb some of the energy. You can have eternal life. It’s true!- Runa Molnes
— Jo Nesbø, Cockroaches
At the time of our conversations, Chelsea Manning was 22 years of age - my own age when I made the choice to surrender to federal authorities ... I saw someone very familiar that day, and suddenly felt very old.
— Adrián Lamo
I am not a wishing well with legs. (Paraphrasing Babylon 5's Londo Mollari, repeately, when asked to perform hacking functions for strangers.)
— Adrián Lamo
Time is with you... but as for the crime in that time... I am ain't fucking sure.
— Deyth Banger
In the course of crime ... the descent is rapid.
— Frederick Marryat, The Pirate
The clouds of night opened like ink blossoming in water.
— Christopher Fowler, Seventy-Seven Clocks
This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes.
— Dave Eggers, The Circle
Oh sod me, Sir, not another bloody Paddy. Even a Brummie is better than another Paddy.
— Jim McGrath, A Death in Winter: 1963
The idea that any of their offspring could possibly be accused of involvement in criminal activities caused deep offence, even to parents who believed that property was theft.
— Amanda Craig
Some sinister secret lay buried in the heart of the graveyard!
— Rajib       Mukherjee, Partho, the Unconventional Investigator: The mystery of the missing bags