The crime and not the scaffold makes the shame.
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
All men have crimes, and most of them are hidden.
MAXWELL ANDERSON, Winterset
If a man should wanton walk with crime ... he shall find in death no great deliverance.
Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause.
CLARENCE DARROW, Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.
AGATHA CHRISTIE, The ABC Murders
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behaviour that is often considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
ROBERT RICE, The Business of Crime
Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.
H.G. WELLS, A Modern Utopia
There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.
CLARENCE DARROW, Clarence Darrow for the Defense
Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.
EMMA GOLDMAN, Anarchism, What it Really Stands For
He who helps the guilty, shares the crime.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS, Sententiae
Commit a crime and the world is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Compensation," Essays
Crime is to man as fleas are to dog, the likelihood of its presence increases as the quality of one's personal circumstances decreases.
JEROME P. CRABB, Crime Quotes and Quibbles
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, Crime and Punishment
Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that specieas alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.
GEORGES BATAILLE, The Trial of Gilles de Rais
It is indeed strange that with all the knowledge we have gained in the past hundred years we preserve and practice the methods of an ancient and barbarous world in our dealing with crime. So long as this is observed and exercised there can be no change except to heap more cruelties and more wretchedness upon those who are the victims of our foolish system.
CLARENCE DARROW, The Story of My Life
