Best 1852 quotes in «crime quotes» category

The grandeur of the thieving falsity is larceny, the fall of cities.

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.

The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.

The great thing about crime is that, like aquatic tube worms, it can thrive in almost any environment.

The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie). ("Introduction")

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.

The idea that the clothes are grubby and degraded as if he wears the same thing the whole time, as if he's been out all night, never takes his clothes off, never washes and he just sleeps that way and probably smells absolutely appalling. He's somebody who in a sense doesn't care about his appearance, even though in fact obviously there's a great style with which he put himself together.

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.

Their encounter had formed a strange chemical bond. Mitch, a hardened ruffian, had opened up the prison of his soul to her. And Kika, who led a bitterly puritanical existence, had started to make love to him on her sofa.

The issue which faced the jury was this: was Sutcliffe a clever criminal, aware of what he was doing and determined to avoid capture? ... In a sense, it was the wrong question. The battle that was fought out in court - the mad/bad dichotomy - both substitutes for and obscures the real dilemma raised by the Yorkshire Ripper case: is Sutcliffe a one-off, su generis as I have heard one psychiatrist describe him, someone who stands outside our culture and has no relation to it? Those who assert that Sutcliffe is mad are in essence saying yes to this question; madness is a closed category, one over which we have no control and for which we bear no responsibility. The deranged stand apart from us; we cannot be blamed for their insanity. Thus the urge to characterize Sutcliffe as mad has powerful emotional origins; it has as much to do with how we see ourselves and the society in which we live... It is a distancing mechanism, a way of establishing a comforting gulf between ourselves and a particularly unacceptable criminal.

The Kremlin has made a habit of accusing others of crimes of which it has been accused of itself [228]

The Legend of Robert Halsey This article examines the criminal conviction of Robert Halsey for sexually abusing two young boys on his school-van route near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Halsey's name has been invoked by academics, journalists, and activists as the victim of the “witch hunt” in this country over child sexual abuse. Based on a comprehensive examination of the trial transcript, this article details the overwhelming evidence of guilt against Mr. Halsey. The credulous acceptance of the “false conviction” legend about Robert Halsey provides a case study in the techniques and tactics used to minimize and deny sexual abuse, while promoting a narrative about “ritual abuse” and “witch hunts” that apparently requires little or no factual basis. The second part of this article analyzes how the erroneous “false conviction” narrative about Robert Halsey was constructed and how it gained widespread acceptance. The Legend of Robert Halsey provides a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wrap even the guiltiest person in a cloak of righteous “witch hunt” claims. Cases identified as “false convictions” by defense lawyers and political activists deserve far greater scrutiny from the media and the public. journal: Cheit, Ross E. "The Legend of Robert Halsey." Journal of child sexual abuse 9.3-4 (2002): 37-52.

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.

The man breathed deeply with his eyes shut and his speech trailed off. Nick approached the patient with the syringe in hand, nodding. He turned the machine up now, almost all the way, and then proceeded with the injection. "I think you're about ready.

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.

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.

Then headed for the kitchen. Fuck. I headed through the lounge… …just as two indistinct pitch-black masses, Kevlar laden, shotguns raised, crept ninja-like through the front door. This time, I didn't even get a bellowed warning. The lead ninja, upon seeing me, sprang forward… and crushed me face flat to the floor. That hurt. It was five long hard seconds before he eased up an iota so I could take a breath, "Hello again, Dennis. Busy night?" I managed from somewhere under his arm or knee or gun-butt. "Bean-bags or bullets?" "Bullets," said Harry. "Easy up, lads. He's scarpered…" Dennis got off of me, locked his shotgun and helped me up, "Sorry," he said. "No worries…

Then Cynthia looked at him and smiled, and he knew he couldn’t possibly resist her, no matter what she had done. It felt as though the two of them had just stripped naked and dived off a high cliff over a beautiful river. The water below looked cool and inviting. But what if it was only six inches deep?

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.

The Nazi's were the era of crimes against the Jews and modern corporate governments are the era of silent crimes against humanity.

The northern star changes its position every ten thousand years, but friendships can last for all eternity. — RJPeters

The offender must be able to give something back. But criminals are most often poor people. They have nothing to give. The answers to this are many. It is correct that our prisons are by and large filled with poor people. We let the poor pay with the only commodity that is close to being equally distributed in society: time.

Then without any warning the car stopped. They were there. "The ride's over," someone said. "End of the ride." For a moment nobody got out. They just sat there. The driver cut the ignition, and after that there was silence. Complete, uncanny silence, more frightening than the most threatening noise or violence could have been. Night silence. A silence that had death in it. ("The Number's Up")

The one ring, to rule them all’? Sounds very far-fetched to me!

The only thing my father does that isn’t illegal is breathe. He’s a criminal through and through.” -Devina (Being Bad, p. 305)

The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head.

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation.

The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended - indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized not as crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.

The price for standing up for Truth, no matter how severe, will always be less than the price our souls will be penalized for not speaking up for our conscience. There is no greater crime in the universe than silencing your conscience.

The prisoner of doubt ends his stint [through suicide], released to the custody of that final question mark which punctuates every life sentence.

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.

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.

The reader is the final arbiter.

The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.

The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region: it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces — those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB — who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now, [...] the true goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire Russian population: “The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order in this country and we’ll do it whatever the cost.

There are crimes that are truly uncomely. With crimes, whatever they may be, the more blood, the more horror there is, the more imposing they are, the more picturesque, so to speak, but there are crimes that are shameful, disgraceful, all horror aside, so to speak, even far too ungracious...

There are flowers growing in hell. Let's go pick them!

There are different types of fear, the most notable being the ‘Fear of Rod’ and the ‘Fear of God’. States and societies create the fear of rod by punishing the guilty using the police and legal machinery. The fear of God is instilled in the mind of the believers since childhood through the teachings of scriptures. A true believer dares not to do anything against the scriptures even when there is no fear of State. When people lose all type of fear, the result is chaos and exponential increase in crime.

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.

There are so many shady things happening in this country, they’re happening all around us all the time, and we just accept them.

There are no more than two or three crimes to commit in the world,’ said Curval. ‘Once those are done there is no more to be said – what remains is inferior and one no longer feels a thing. How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze – those would be crimes indeed, and not the little excesses in which we indulge, which do no more than metamorphose, in the course of a year, a dozen creatures into clods of earth.

There are people who kill, and people who get killed.

There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over. "There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven.

There is always a unique atmosphere in the car when you drive through the City with a dead body in the back.

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.

There is no code among men because there are no men anymore. Only monsters who sit behind their desks and give orders.

There is no mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn -- or worse, indifference -- cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man dies not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.

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.

There is nothing morally wrong with buying stolen goods, unless you know that they were stolen.