c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
My experience of crims, Swann began, most of the ones locked up at least, is that they're either stupid, unlucky or they're lashing out. Most of them aren't dangerous. The ones that are, sure, they belong in jail.
— D. Whish Wilson
My husband hands me my glass, full to the brim with green-gold wine and I stifle my resentment and attempt to smile at him. I mustn’t lose sight of what we have – two beautiful children; an amazing house that I never, in a million years, thought we’d be able to afford; Gill and Andy, my best friends – and this perfect day. I take a deep breath and feel my shoulders relax. I can smell the faintest trace of heather, drifting down from the moor.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
The moor has always been part of my life. It’s like a muse: the colours of the heather and the sky; how you can see the savagery of the wind in the way the dwarf pine trees are bent double, the bleak lines of the landscape in winter when everything save the moss and the grass are dead, stones like bones, poking through a thin skin of bilberry bushes, rushes reflected in black bog water.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
Hello my darling, I’m your real father. I’ve been searching for you ever since you were stolen from me. I love you so much. Daddy
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
It’s quiet in the suburbs. It’s too cold for people to be in their gardens; and it’s not a thoroughfare so few cars drive by. I look past decaying roses and through the first flush of Michelmas daisies, blazing a glorious purple, into the darkened windows of the houses we walk by. Who lives here? Are they watching us? Did one of our neighbours do something seven years ago that he now regrets? How little we know of the people who surround us.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
The dark edge of the moor and the Cow and Calf rock are crisp against the blue-black sky. I can’t see anyone outside, watching us. As I shut the door behind me, I hear a noise. It came from the hall. I feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
I think about the story I always tell her – of the kind lady who gave her to us. I suppose that must be how she imagines her father – as a kind man who gave her away too, as if she were a gift. Only now he wants her back.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
He places the skull in the palm of my hand. There are four canines; the top two are so long and curved I can feel them pricking my skin. There’s a green tinge round the eye socket and in a fine line across the cranium. I’m not sure what animal it’s from. ‘Stoat,’ Harris says, as if I’ve spoken out loud. ‘They hunt grouse and partridge. I found it behind my house. I buried the body in the furze until it was just bone.’ His hand is still beneath mine, supporting it. I think of him seeing the small dead creature and digging a tiny grave for it. Planning ahead for all those months just so he’d see the skeleton. Or maybe he severed the animal’s head and that was the only part he buried. ‘It’s been waiting for you all this time. Like I have.
— Sanjida Kay, The Stolen Child
But if you were investigating a crime,” said Lady Swaffham, “you’d have to begin by the usual things, I suppose — finding out what the person had been doing, and who’d been to call, and looking for a motive, wouldn’t you?”“Oh, yes,” said Lord Peter, “but most of us have such dozens of motives for murderin’ all sorts of inoffensive people. There’s lots of people I’d like to murder, wouldn’t you?”“Heaps,” said Lady Swaffham.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body?
To catch the bad guys, you've got to think like a bad guy - and that's why all the best detectives have a dark side...
— David Videcette, The Theseus Paradox
So here my check. Overdue and overdrawn. Cash it in hell.
— Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door
...but wasn't everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn't every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That's the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There's even Edith Pargeter's Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way.
— David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls
Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such as"expropriating the expropriators," "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty," "they did it to me so I can do it to them," and, in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero" (1 + 1 = 0).The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy
"You ever been arrested before?"    "No sir. This is my first time."    "The first time this week, you mean."    "Oh, I been arrested in Michigan. I thought you meant in Illinois. I never been arrested in Illinois. I never did no wrong in Illinois."    "What good does that do you?"    "It don't. It's just that I love my state so much I go to Michigan to steal," he explained with an expression almost beatific.
— Nelson Algren, The Neon Wilderness
That's the nature of any kind of rot. If you don't stop it, it keeps going. It will keep going until it destroys the very organism that feeds it.
— F. H. Batacan
Her friends used to tell her it wasn't rape if the man was your husband. She didn't say anything, but inside she seethed; she wanted to take a knife to their faces.
— F. H. Batacan
If someone's personhood is in doubt (or seen as lacking), all the easier to direct death wishes at them. When a tiny minority of them transgresses, their crimes of violence only confirm their abjection from the human [. . .] Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy.
— José Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond
Marv's a guy you've got to be careful around. He doesn't mean any harm, but he causes plenty.
— Frank Miller, Sin City, Vol. 2: A Dame to Kill For
There is a weird kind of anonymity a roller coaster provides: It’s populated, but everyone’s too preoccupied with whirling around the roof of a casino to eavesdrop. It runs a fixed amount of time, has minimal surveillance for lack of a way to descramble the audio, and it’s conveniently out of earshot for certain writer- types who might scribble down the plan.
— Daniel Younger, The Wrath of Con
What a prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself whilst it harbors under thesame roof, with so agreeing and so calm a society, both the crime and the judge?
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
It was a mild winter’s evening in ‘Japp’s Saloon and Speakeasy’, in the northwest corner of the only legal red-light area of the city. (The S.O.D.s believed in crime management.) Timaset Skooch leaned back in the aluminum framed chair, checking his cards carefully while wearing his best poker face. Across the table from him sat Jonn Deire, a large man who was trying very hard to out-poker face him and who didn’t enjoy jokes about his name much.
— Christina Engela, Loderunner
Every year, without fail, we outlaw more things, catch more people doing them, and put more of them in jail. The outlawed behavior never goes away, because, directly or indirectly, it's supported by the strong, invisible, unrelenting force called vision. This explains why police officers are much more likely to take up crime than criminals are to take up law enforcement. It's called 'going with the flow.
— Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure
He saved me in so many ways. I didn't see it at first. He saved me from certain death. He's the scariest person I've ever met, but for some reason I felt safe with him. Now I'm just a fading star amongst all the bright ones...All I want is love and all I get is people trying to kill me and take away what peace I manage to find in between.
— Michelle Horst, Predator
Police not enforcing laws results in a high crime rate that is formally reported as a low crime rate in police statistics.
— Steven Magee
But he couldn't feel self-pity in the face of the memorial. He hadn't lost nearly enough as these children, who'd lost their homeland and, in many cases,their whole families. Perhaps they had gained something, too, though. They had at least escaped the concentration camps, been taken in by good, caring families, and had grown up to live their lives in relative freedom.
— Peter Robinson, Strange Affair
It might be worthwhile to take a familiar question—why is there so much crime in modern society?—and stand it on its head: why isn't there a bit more crime?After all, every one of us regularly passes up opportunities to main, steal, and defraud. The chance of going to jail—thereby losing your job, your house, and your freedom, all of which are essentially economic penalties—is certainly a strong incentive. But when it comes to crime people also respond to moral incentives (they don't want to do something they consider wrong) and social incentives (they don't want to be seen by others as doing something wrong).
— Steven D. Levitt
Did you ask people to crime scenes on dates?
— Maureen Johnson, The Name of the Star
I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious."Not if they're over eighteen," he said, shutting the till of the cash register.By then the bar itself had become an appendage, a second torso holding up my first. "You take someone's breath away," I stressed. "You rob them of the ability to utter a single word." I tipped the neck of the empty liquor bottle toward him. "You steal a heart."He wiped up in front of me with a dishrag. "Any judge would toss that case out on its ass.""You'd be surprised."Seven spread the rag out on the brass bar to dry. "Sounds like a misdemeanor, if you ask me."I rested my cheek on the cool, damp wood. "No way," I said. "Once you're in, it's for life.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
While the layman sees an opportunity and decides to take it, the professional criminal through the use of deceit and treachery, is able to create opportunities. This individual not only actively searches for a crime to commit, the professional criminal assembles teams of similar people and generates situations in which crime can be safely perpetrated in a controlled environment for maximum profit.
— Gary "Gunz" Govich, Career Criminal: My Life in the Russian Mob Until the Day I Died
How many crimes have been committed for no other reason than that the perpetrator could not bear being in the wrong!
— Albert Camus, The Fall
Her mother told her once that her father was sick. That the sickness made him do it. She made it seem logical. As if he was lying in a hospital bed with cancer rather than rotting in a prison cell for rape and murder.
— Anais Torres, The Reaper's Daughter
there used to be, dirtside, a legal defenses called "diminished capacity" and "not guilty by reason on insanity." These concepts would bewilder a Loonie. In Luna City a man would necessarily be of diminished mental capacity to even think about rape; to carry one out would be the strongest possible proof of insanity - but among Loonies such mental disorders would not gain a rapist any sympathy. loonies do not psychoanalyze a rapist; they kill him. Now. Fast. Brutally.
— Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
That NASA was involved suggests that L.A. was considered so alien both to police officers and to scientists that it resembled the landscape of another world. There is Mars, there is the moon, and there is Los Angeles.
— Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City
Almost doesn't count.
— R. Felini
The minute your group gets so big you don't know anybody in it and they don't know you, there's hell to pay.
— Dorothy Canfield Fisher
A good Policeman/woman looks for crimes. A bad policeman/woman looks for opportunity.
— Richard Diaz
Total violent crime in the United States 2013: (Number:1,163,146), (Rate per 100,000: 367.9).
— Federal Bureau of Investigation
Mason was a first-rate spatial voyeur, an autodidact of architectural exteriors.
— Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City
A few thoughts on crime and punishment:Punishment—either don’t merit it, or learn to embrace it.It is easy to endure punishment, much harder to accept it.Committing a crime is like incurring a debt: you can either pay it off now, or pay it off later—with interest.
— Clifford Cohen
Crime is an attitude learnt overtime and can be as a result of condition of place one has found himself. Crime can be graded, so it's possible environment can affect high class rich and low class poor. Therefore criminal justice system is supposed to be graded as to achieve equity in result.
— Chidiebere Prosper Agbugba
Moriston House is really quite beautiful. No wonder everyone wants to be murdered here.--Roberta "Bobbie" Aldridge
— Jennifer A. Girardin, The Monday Criminologist
Death by misadventure sounds like a hopeful possibility.--Marjorie Branell-Markson
— Jennifer A. Girardin, The Altered Suggestion
Right now I'm wearing an illegal smile.
— Waseem Latif
I hate unbreakable alibis--they are usually the first to crack. --Hugo Anstead
— Jennifer A. Girardin, The Uncertainty Principle
What makes you think I’d know this woman?’ Hunter knew what he was trying to do. ‘Listen, P-Diddy . . .’ ‘D-King . . .’ ‘Whatever.
— Chris Carter, The Crucifix Killer
A thorough investigation would prove that nine crimes out of ten could be traced, directly or indirectly, to our economic and social iniquities, to our system of remorseless exploitation and robbery.
— Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays
Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.
— Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah
We’ve got DNA tests; we can convict someone by his saliva. Hell, if the killer had farted in that house the forensic team would probably have some gadget that could pick it up. How can the crime scenes be so clean?
— Chris Carter, The Crucifix Killer
One way or another we’re taking your bank. All you have to do is decide the level of persuasion we need to apply.
— David Louden, Heroes of Hollywood Boulevard
The Nazis destroyed the independence of the press by passing series of draconian laws and it seems we are exactly imitating the same with the freedom of the internet by passing Prevention of Electronic Crimes Bill.
— Arzak Khan
The course she was on was as fixed and unalterable as the trajectory of a bullet, but you could see she did not believe that. No one in the life ever believed it. They saw a dozen, a hundred, a thousand people precede them into the trap, saw how unvarying and pitiless the end was, and with all that fresh in their minds they did the same, of their own free will.
— Miles Watson, Cage Life
I'm amazed at how [police officers] don't want to come to court. They want to make the case and they want it to get prosecuted, but they don't want to come testify. Sorry, but the ultimate way of writing your report is telling it to a jury. When I was a defense lawyer, I used to think all police officers were liars, but now I find that there are only a few. Most of them are pretty straightforward and do a good job. But there are some, and if I know that they are liars or I know they tend to exaggerate, I try to take that into consideration when I'm dealing with their cases.
— Mark     Baker, D.A.: Prosecutors in Their Own Words
Films in the start you can't really say who will be the killer, who won't be, most times what you say is wrong (Of course if you have watched the film before that and now saying that you haven't it's a great lie, but I don't lie I just have the gift to predict!), the middle is messy because comes stuff which you won't ever thought, sometimes the quite people are the killers. The people which are suspected or investigated aren't the true killers they are the victims or in more cases just a wrong choice!The end is something which says a lot of for one film, if the killer wins it's show a new place in the films, if there is happy end it's something which is often.
— Deyth Banger
There was something unbearable about the damp, dark earth closing over a coffin and the still, empty flesh that was inside. She had attended a hundred funerals, but when you really loved someone there was something too final about a burial. Something brutal.
— Sara Sheridan, Operation Goodwood
[C]ritics of Canadian securities regulators sometimes point out that a number of high-profile US securities cases have resulted in prison sentences for the offenders, while incarceration for Canadian securities law violators seems very rare...[A]s has often been noted, incarceration is far more frequent in the United States for crimes of all kinds, yet it is not usually suggested that this is proof that the United States is generally a safer place to live than Canada.
— Paul Halpern, Back from the Brink: Lessons from the Canadian Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Crisis
How was it they had cut to Hollywood Boulevard for a fluff piece and ended up with Gangs of New-Fucking-York?! Bonnie looked to her co-Anchor. He was wearing a good mouth for cooling soup.
— David Louden, Heroes of Hollywood Boulevard
Marilyn Monroe is pissing me off, Charlie Chaplin owes me twenty bucks, that fucker Shrek tried to fuck my girlfriend at Baskin Robbins.
— David Louden, Heroes of Hollywood Boulevard
Every little prick out there wants me to lift them. I had this one kid from Oklahoma, big fat shitter he was. Legs as fat as a Downers forehead screaming Up, up, Hulk up! at me for ten minutes until I had no other choice. Fat fucker damn near put my back out and then his old man stiffs me with Canadian dollars. Canadian, can you believe that shit?!
— David Louden, Heroes of Hollywood Boulevard
They stood either side of him like haunting little genetic bookends. The one thing he’ll leave behind, two kids who called another man for help with their homework.
— David Louden, Heroes of Hollywood Boulevard
The boulevard was awash with the curious and the shocked as wave after wave of tourist crashed into the unmoving masses of families who had just witnessed a brawl between The Incredible Hulk and SpongeBob Squarepants over territory, boundaries and the age old issue of ownership.
— David Louden, Heroes of Hollywood Boulevard
An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave.
— Sara Sheridan, Operation Goodwood
David Thomas: What do you think is the worst crime that could possibly be committed? What is the crime that offends you most?David Bowie: Seeing a man humble himself in his capacity as a worker to somebody else, and having to have that accepted as a given situation.
— David Bowie
Crime doesn’t take a holiday. It changes costume for the season, and Christmas is the season for domestic violence. Too much pressure to deliver the perfect gift, and not enough money. Too little to say, and too much alcohol encouraging confessions. Never enough love or imagination to deliver the dream.
— Peter  Kirby, The Dead of Winter
The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
To start with, the overwhelming majority of serial killers are male,’ Hunter explained. ‘Female serial killers have a tendency to kill for monetary profit. While that can also be true their male counterparts, it’s very unlikely. Sexual reasons top the list for male serial killers. Case studies have also shown that female killers generally kill people close to them, such as husbands, family members, or people dependent on them. Males kill strangers more often. Female serial killers also tend to kill more quietly, with poison or other less violent methods, like suffocation. Male serial killers, on the other hand, show a greater tendency to include torture or mutilation as part of the process of killing. When women are implicated in sadistic homicides, they’ve usually acted in partnership with a man.
— Chris Carter, The Crucifix Killer
The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
A hundred times I must have thought of ways to take it back, but I wasn't smart enough to understand that an apology is a sign of strenght, not weakness (...)
— Terry Hayes
Crime must be brought under control... Freedom without civility, freedom without the ability to live in peace, was not true freedom at all.
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
He’s my new partner JJ and I don’t think he likes you very much. Last guy he took a dislike to still can’t eat anything more solid than yogurt.’ ‘Can’t you keep him on a leash?’ ‘Sure I can. The leash is in the car. I’ll go get it. You guys will be OK by yourselves for ten minutes or so, right?
— Chris Carter, The Crucifix Killer
The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.
— Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger
It was worse than a crime
—  it was a blunder.
Every time I think I'm about to seize the moment, it drifts back into the shadows, just beyond my reach.
— Paula Hawkins
Gary Robinson died hungry.He wanted fried chicken, the three-piece box for $2.19. Drunk, loud, and obnoxious, he pushed ahead of seven customers on line at a fast-food chicken outlet. The counter girl told him that his behavior was impolite. She calmed him down with sweet talk, and he agreed to step to the end of the line. His turn came just before closing time, just after the fried chicken ran out.He punched the counter girl so hard her ears rang, and a security guard shot him—three times.
— Edna Buchanan, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat
Conspiracy is always inspired by conspirators
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
We already knew how much there was; it was splashed all over the evening papers in large, glaring headlines: ‘Bank robbers grab £67,500!’ ‘Biggest bank robbery ever!’ ‘Daring bandits escape with huge sum!’ Take your pick; it all made lurid reading. According to the press the police were closing in on the raiders and their arrest was imminent. I got up and put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door - that should stop them!
— Stephen Richards, It's Criminal: The True Confessions of a Jet Set Master Criminal
I’ve often been asked; how do you rob a bank? The answer to that is that there is no instruction book. The fact is you never know what will happen when you step through the door of a bank and declare yourself. Certainly, you can work hard on preparations; have everything organised from vehicles to weapons and set out the getaway, but there are no set rules.
— Stephen Richards, It's Criminal: The True Confessions of a Jet Set Master Criminal
I’ve seen some of the most violent hard cases in the city twinkling through a quickstep and dipping into a tango with an aplomb and skill that would have earned them a guest spot on Come Dancing.
— Stephen Richards, It's Criminal: The True Confessions of a Jet Set Master Criminal
But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?'Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: 'If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.
— G.K. Chesterton
Some people call street lights 'Crime Lights', as they are associated with an increased level of criminal activity.
— Steven Magee
Isn’t Santa just a stand in for the society that has locked them up for formative years? Something that watches and judges, telling them that they got what they deserved based on their behavior? Surely they have to have noticed that Saint Nick, like the judicial system itself, tends to look more favorably upon rich children. He is fat, white, past middle age, and holds all the cards.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not.
— Robert Galbraith
I was having a field day down the Westend; my deep pockets were jingling and full of money nearly every day of the week. My brother’s bird, Irene, wanted a fur coat, so I got her one by throwing a brick through the shop window and grabbing the coat off the shop dummy. Once I got to the bed-sit, I put the jacket on and waltzed in to the flat looking like Liberace, the two of them burst out laughing. Irene was like a tramp eating chips.	‘Let’s try it on, Jimmy, please?’	As she swooned around like Joan Collins with the fur coat on, she had the air of a council estate beauty queen about her.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
Mind you, with all this emphasis on the householder now being able to use ‘reasonable force’ to protect their home, I wouldn’t even consider it. I mean, look what that Farmer Tony Martin did to those creepers!
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
SLAP! I saw a bright flash in front of my eyes, ‘Don’t you try and be a fucking smart arse in here, Holland, this is Partick cop shop you’re in,’ the irate copper retorted.	‘So fuck,’ I snapped.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
Once again, off this skinny prick of a copper went. BANG! SLAP! PUNCH! It was more like a Batman movie! He could hit me all night, but it wouldn’t make any difference.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
I got my lawyer to visit me in the jail. He couldn’t believe the bruising over my body, so he pulled the governor and asked why I was covered in marks. The governor said to my lawyer that it was ‘self-inflicted’ and was caused by my ‘running into walls’. That part was disproved because walls don’t leave footprints all over your body.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
I felt like Dirty Harry, only, my weapon wasn’t as big as his! I don’t know what it is with guns, but once you’ve got your hand on one, you think you’re one of the untouchables.
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
I waltzed into the hall with my escort of five screws like some rapper with his well-paid entourage. A fiendish looking, little bastard with blonde hair and a crooked nose came up to me and said, ‘Okay, Holland, welcome to Shotts. Welcome to the man-eater!
— Stephen Richards, Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
I can’t remember exactly when I started to steal, but I do remember being aware of the fact that if I wanted to enjoy myself and be popular, money was the way to do it.
— Stephen Richards, It's Criminal: The True Confessions of a Jet Set Master Criminal
When you're reading a good noir, the shocks and twists have a way of feeling deja vu-like, as if you saw them coming, but hoped the characters would take a left turn... not answer the phone, not sleep with that woman, not sell drugs to those cops... but knew they would. It would have been wrong if they didn't, and the real surprise can be that you care about someone you know is in for hell. You relate to them, even when their hell is so much bigger than your own. But we're all going to die, and we all make mistakes.The best noir stories make you forget plot entirely by giving you characters that feel so well-realised you can't look away as they fall.
— Ed Brubaker
In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.
— Thomas Szasz, Law, Liberty and Psychiatry
The way I look at it is this: If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.
— Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings
If a man loses his money through unwise market speculation or by playing the horses, he has been punished in a manner which we may call passive. By this I mean that another person has not taken special, socially overt steps to harm the "offender." This phenomenon has not received the attention it deserves.
— Thomas Szasz, Law, Liberty and Psychiatry
I think people more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possible because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.
— Agatha Christie
Tell me my little children, what crime has this lizard committed that it must die this evening?” There was silence. In raising my head like a joke, I tried to laugh. That was the same time I realized that grandma was dead serious with us.Pg.26
— Obehi Peter Ewanfoh, Still Owing Me Goodbye
Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.
— Henry Thomas Buckle
In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable.
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity
Statistically, the odds that any given rape was committed by a serial offender are around 90 percent," Lisak said. "The research is clear on this. The foremost issue for police and prosecutors should be that you have a predator out there. By reporting this rape, the victim is giving you an opportunity to put this guy away. If you decline to pursue the case because the victim was drunk, or had a history of promiscuity, or whatever, the offender is almost certainly going to keep raping other women. We need cops and prosecutors who get it that 'nice guys' like Frank are serious criminals.
— Jon Krakauer, Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town
There is no point of relaying statistics on rape because for every figure given there are thousands missing, unreported. It is a shameful state we have created where a victim chooses to endure the pain and suffering, silenced by fear that judgment will come before justice.
— Aysha Taryam
An anarchist is someone who rejects the curious notion that crimes become virtues as they grow in size.
— Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski, The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty
To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.
— Chris Womersley, Bereft
After all, the girl actually had faith in something, which was more than most people had in these dark times. It was wrong to destroy it.
— Chris Womersley, Bereft
there are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it?
— Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos
I guess having one hundred and four condoms full of heroin in your guts and the thought of a firing squad in your head make will make most things seem insignificant.
— S.A. Tawks, Mule
More police and courts and more prisons and better investigative techniques are fine, but the only way crime is going to go down is if all of us simply stop accepting and tolerating it in our families, our friends, and our associates...Crime is a moral problem. It can only be resolved on a moral level.
— John E. Douglas
I let my gaze travel out the picture window. Unlike at my old doublewide trailer perched on the fringe of a played out quarry, here I owned a real yard with real grass that screamed for mowing each Monday a.m. I sat at the kitchen table, cooling off from just having finished this week's job. Yes, here in 2005, I was a full-fledged suburbanite, but I'd been called worse.
— Ed Lynskey, The Zinc Zoo
Do not judge the offender before you return back to him his beloved one and his small dreams.
— jihad eltabey
A story is a wondrous invention.
— Chris Womersley, Bereft
The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age. Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system.
— Michel Foucault
We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears.
— Chris Womersley, Bereft
Quote taken from Chapter 1: That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper." He let that part gel in me. "Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham.
— Ed Lynskey
One's child is always one's child no matter what age they might be. You worry when your child makes a noise, when he doesn't. It's a terrible kind of love. Terrible.
— Chris Womersley, Bereft
The liars among us will know that every lie must contain a certain amount of truth if it's to be convincing. A dash of truth is often enough, but it's indispensable, like the olive in the martini.
— Sascha Arango, The Truth and Other Lies
Oh my God! Get out right now!”Gio blinked, surprised at her sudden vehemence. “I was in here first.”“The upstairs is—”“Off-limits. Yeah, I know. So were you, but that didn’t stop me. In case you haven’t noticed, I have serious issues with following rules.
— Bethany-Kris, Giovanni
I’m not an easy lay, I won’t do a one-night stand, and my father is a mob boss with a short temper and a collection of guns. Still want to take me out?” - Ana Avdonin
— Bethany-Kris, Demyan & Ana
If you want a better answer, krasivyy, ask a better question. - Koldan Vasin
— Bethany-Kris, Demyan & Ana
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 the control. The act of taking, breaking the rules, makes them feel powerful. They're in it for the sheer defiance.
— V.E. Schwab
It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to bethese days, when I got this call. I could hear the rainbattering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang.
— C.S. Woolley, The Kevin Metis Saga
In that hothouse atmosphere, criminal records bloomed like orchids all around us.
— Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
There are not so many murders in this township, I think to myself, and not so few policemen, that a killing should be treated like an old woman who has lost her cat.
— Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South Africa
Unfortunately, it doesn’t ever really matter what the truth is. Only what they think it is.
— Kenneth Eade, HOA Wire
So where'd you park the car, Max?''I don't know. I couldn't see over the wheel.''That's okay. I think I can smell it.
— Steve Purcell
Constable N stepped away from the car, into the darkness where Darren could not see where his gun was pointing, and fired two rounds into the air. The gunshots cracked the roof of the night sky and echoed back at us. My first thought was that they could be heard all over Toekomsrus; I wondered how many imaginations had in that instant conjured a different story to explain the gunshots; a record of all those stories, I found myself thinking, would probably document every fear this place has of itself and its young men.
— Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South Africa
Life is like a boxing match, it seems, society has not been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of crime
— irak.ibrahim hussain didi
About a year ago, an entire suburb in this man’s jurisdiction turned from the police and erected a substitute agency. To all intents and purposes, several thousand people here have severed their relationship with the South African Police Service. He appears not to have noticed.
— Jonny Steinberg, Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South Africa
Her sleep was enlivened by several dreams. One where Professor Wanstead's bushy eyebrows fell off because they were not his own eyebrows, but false ones. As she woke again, her first impression was that which often follows dreams, a belief that the dream in question had solved everything. 'Of course,' she thought, 'of course!' His eyebrows were false and that solved the whole thing. He was the criminal.
— Agatha Christie
A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind. 
— Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog
I grew excited when I realized this basic asymmetry implied that nothing – no evidence, no information, no facts or data – connected me to the stranger except for the evidence of my own personal observations which remained private as long as I kept them that way. And what did that mean? First of all, it meant I could influence the stranger’s life in any way I wanted without him or anyone else suspecting my involvement. But what did that mean? Among other things, it meant I could disrupt this man’s life in some rather extreme ways and never become a suspect in a subsequent investigation. Or did it mean that? I wasn’t sure but I felt I needed to find out.
— Emericus Durden
Conan Doyle deluded a century of readers into thinking we're all deductive geniuses.
— Rob Thomas, Mr. Kiss and Tell
Crime? What crime? ... My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman ... and you call that a crime?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you control the code, you control the world. This is the future that awaits us.
— Marc Goodman, Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It
Technology is a queer thing
—  it brings you great gifts with one hand and it stabs you in the back with the other.
If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
— OMAR N. BRADLEY
What better weapon than the human brain? The human brain was Mrs Twartski's and Wiezenslowski's domain. The children who were used were the castaways of the United States government, like dogs abandoned and a vet's office. Mrs. Twartski read the letter out loud, slowly and carefully enunciating every word in her thick Polish accent. The German scientists were looking for children who could learn quickly, were between ages four and twelve, and could withstand being famished without dying. Deutschland were paying dollar $50,000 per subject. Everyone in living room exactly Mrs. Twartski and all my aunts let out a huge "Ahhh". My sister's and my eyes grew wide because we had no idea what this meant or why the adults were so excited. Then my sister's eyes narrowed as if she knew something that I didn't yet, as if she had just figured something out.
— Wendy Hoffman, The Enslaved Queen: A Memoir about Electricity and Mind Control
Speculation is a dangerous thing without any evidence to back it up.
— Jane Casey
A pawn only needs to move five spaces to become the queen" - from Bhendi Bazaar
— Vish Dhamija, Bhendi Bazaar
When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.
— Don Roff
The ability of one to affect many is scaling exponentially — and it's scaling for good and it's scaling for evil.
— Marc Goodman, Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It
The last I knew you were going to a party. just a few friends at the McEvoys' you told me. The science club, you told me. What happened? You got into a fight about the theory of relativity? Did creationists crash the party and start a rumble?
— Tami Hoag
He’d have denied it to his dying breath but Derwent wasn’t as tough as he pretended to be. For the very small number of people he cared about, Derwent would give his all. It made him vulnerable, and every now and then that vulnerability showed.
— Jane Casey
For me, writing isn't about money and fame. It's about passion, an art form that I want to share with the world, expand the horizons to new worlds, new experiences, and new adventures.
— Jason W. Blair
All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?
— Ian McEwan
If Hori were to die, I should not forget! Hori is a song in my heart for ever... That means-that there is no more death...
— Agatha Christie
Contentment sounds ideal; and ignorance is bliss! But what remains of truth, justice and liberty? Why can millions of parent do what I did, and not give the law a consideration? Why do I have to suffer the losses of divorce—the pain and sorrow so accompanied the plight of once-parent, now non-custodial? So much more could be preceded by “why”—so as to leave nothing more. To speak, or think, of these many questions is to sound like I’m whining. But I am whining, about why….
— H. Kirk Rainer, A Father and Future Felon
Chatty, defensive, observant. My new favorite witness.
— Rob Thomas, Mr. Kiss and Tell
What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime.
— Frank W. Abagnale
Crime should not pay, it must be punished. Unfortunately, in Pakistan big crimes do get rewarded.
— Imran Khan
The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.
— Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho
I obeyed, but my crime was that I did not look obedient.
— Tehmina Durrani, My Feudal Lord
During a period in which women and children’s testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned “ritual abuse” as the new frontier of disbelief. The term “ritual abuse” arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of “recovered memories”, “false allegations” and “moral panic”.Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief.
— Michael Salter
We have a hostage to pay ransom for in the morning so we can use him as ransom when we meet other kidnappers in the afternoon.
— Michael Prelee, Milky Way Repo
It is acknowledged that father-daughter incest occurs on a large scale in the United States. Sexual abuse has now been included in child abuse legislation. A conservative estimate is that more than 1 million women have been sexually victimized by their fathers or other male relatives, but the true figure probably is much higher. Many victims still fear reporting incest, and families continued to collude to keep the situation secret. Issues of family privacy and autonomy remain troublesome even when incest is reported and must be resolved for treatment to be effective. " Mary de Chesnay J. Psychosoc. Nurs. Med. Health Sep. 22:9-16 Sept 1984 reprinted in Talbott's 1986 edition
— John A. Talbott, Year Book of Psychiatry and Applied Mental Health
It's like this with us baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts....nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.
— Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister
The hotel was guest-friendly with hourly rates and had enough room to swing a cat, if it were a small cat and you wanted to swing it.
— James A. Newman, Red Night Zone - Bangkok City
Outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.
— Marion Barry
A few years ago I started an online flirtation with a high school flame, Andy. Things got weird and I called it off and two months later...Versace was dead...dead.
— Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan
People who foster dependence on illicit drugs such as heroin are regarded among the most unscrupulous pariahs of modern civilisation. In contrast, pushers of licit drugs tend to be viewed as altruistically motivated purveyors of social good.
— John Braithwaite, Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry
The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future.
— lois bujord
Drama!" said Mr. Hitchens.Robin Shrugged. "That's what terrorism is, basically--pure theater. Nothing in particular is ever accomplished by it, other than to focus attention on a small group of people who seize absolute power by threatening everything that holds civilization together.""Absolute power," mused Mrs. Pollifax. "Like monstrous children thumbing their noses at adults who live by codes and laws and scru
— Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha
These guys we're meeting? They're dead. Saji has had things done to people who crossed him or whom he has perceived as crossing him. Ugly things. These guys we're meeting? They think they're tough. They run book, own strip clubs, dabble in petty theft and probably sell dope for all I know and they're comfortable in that world, thinking they own it. That arrogance? That feeling that they can just push people around and do anything they want? It has left them with one foot in the grave and they don't even know it.
— Michael Prelee, Milky Way Repo
Did he seem crazy?"Captain Geechy seemed perplexed. "No. He was quite calm and businesslike, actually. Why do you ask?""I ask because his plan to get rich involves hijacking a starship full of dead people," she said. "That seems like the act of someone who isn't in their right mind. It concerns me that someone not in their right mind is holding me hostage.
— Michael Prelee, Milky Way Repo
Whose Daddy's Little Girl Now?
— Lauren Bradshaw, Daddy's Girl
We live in a world in which women are battered and are unable to flee from the men who beat them, although their door is theoretically standing wide open. One out of every four women becomes a victim of severe violence. One out of every two will be confronted by sexual harassment over her lifetime. These crimes are everywhere and can take place behind any front door in the country, every day, and barely elicit much more than a shrug of the shoulders and superficial dismay.
— Natascha Kampusch, 3,096 Days
We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear - by turning offenders into victims themselves and by describing their behavior as the result of forces beyond their control.
— Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders
Oddly then, in our search for meaning, we often assign victims too much blame for their assaults, and offenders too little. Our inconsistencies do not seem to trouble us, but they are truly puzzling. After all, if the offender is not to blame for his behavior, why would the victim be, no matter what she did our didn't do? Our views make sense, however, if you think that we are trying to reassure ourselves that we are not helpless and, that, in any case, no one is out to get us.
— Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders
Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from ... It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as not to have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head. Society uses the victims of sensational cases such as mine in order to divest itself of the responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps – even when they ask for help.
— Natascha Kampusch, 3,096 Days
It was wrong. It was like arresting the gun for murder.
— Ellery Queen, The Player on the Other Side